 Ability composition in the class and the school performance of immigrant studentsElena Meschi and Caterina Pavese Labour Economics, 2023, vol. 85, issue C Abstract: Using longitudinal data from the Italian National Institute for the Evaluation of the Education System (INVALSI), this paper investigates whether the ability of peers affects the educational attainment of immigrant students. We not only focus on the average quality of peers in the class, but also further investigate which part of the ability distribution of peers drives the effect, by assessing the role played by the extreme tails of the ability distribution. Our empirical strategy addresses students’ endogenous sorting into classes by exploiting the within-student across-subjects variation in achievements and the simultaneity problem by using predetermined measures of peers’ ability. We show that peers’ ability matters. While native students are mostly influenced by the average quality of their peers, immigrant children are detrimentally affected by the share of very low achievers in the classroom. Our findings provide valuable guidance to policymakers concerning the allocation of students to classes in order to foster immigrant students’ integration and learning. Keywords: Peer effects; Immigrant students; Education (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:labeco:v:85:y:2023:i:c:s0927537123001252 DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2023.102450 Access Statistics for this article Labour Economics is currently edited by A. Ichino More articles in Labour Economics from Elsevier |
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