Does Immigration Affect the Long-Term Educational Outcomes of Natives? Quasi-Experimental Evidence

Eric Gould, Victor Lavy and M. Daniele Paserman

No 5439, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: This paper uses the mass migration wave to Israel in the 1990s to examine the impact of immigrant concentration during elementary school on the long-term academic outcomes of native students in high school. To identify the causal effect of immigrant children on their native peers, the empirical strategy must address two sources of bias: the endogenous sorting of immigrants across schools, and the endogenous grade placement of immigrants within schools. We control for the endogeneity of immigrant placement across schools by conditioning on the total number of immigrants in a school and exploit random variation in the number of immigrants across grades within the same school. To address the endogenous grade placement of immigrants within schools, we use the immigrants' dates of birth as an instrument for their actual grade placement. The results suggest that the overall presence of immigrants in a grade had a significant and large adverse effect on two important outcomes for Israeli natives: the dropout rate and the chances of passing the high school matriculation exam which is necessary to attend college.

Keywords: School quality; Natural experiment; Peer effects; Dropout rates; Immigrant absorption (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-hrm and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP5439 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Does Immigration Affect the Long-Term Educational Outcomes of Natives? Quasi-Experimental Evidence (2009)
Working Paper: Does Immigration Affect the Long-Term Educational Outcomes of Natives? Quasi-Experimental Evidence (2005)
Working Paper: Does Immigration Affect the Long-Term Educational Outcomes of Natives? Quasi-Experimental Evidence (2004)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:5439

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP5439

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().