Diversity in Schools: Immigrants and the Educational Performance of U.S. Born Students

David Figlio, Paola Giuliano, Riccardo Marchingiglio (), Umut Ozek and Paola Sapienza
Additional contact information
Riccardo Marchingiglio: Northwestern University
Umut Ozek: American Institutes for Research

No 14196, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study the effect of exposure to immigrants on the educational outcomes of US-born students, using a unique dataset combining population-level birth and school records from Florida. This research question is complicated by substantial school selection of US-born students, especially among White and comparatively affluent students, in response to the presence of immigrant students in the school. We propose a new identification strategy to partial out the unobserved non-random selection into schools, and find that the presence of immigrant students has a positive effect on the academic achievement of US-born students, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Moreover, the presence of immigrants does not affect negatively the performance of affluent US-born students, who typically show a higher academic achievement compared to immigrant students. We provide suggestive evidence on potential channels.

Keywords: educational attainment; immigrant students (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I24 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 79 pages
Date: 2021-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-ltv, nep-mig and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published - published in: Review of Economic Studies, 2024, 91 (2), 972–1006,

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp14196.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Diversity in Schools: Immigrants and the Educational Performance of U.S.-Born Students (2024)
Working Paper: Diversity in Schools: Immigrants and the Educational Performance of U.S. Born Students (2021)
Working Paper: Diversity in Schools: Immigrants and the Educational Performance of U.S. Born Students (2021)
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:iza:izadps:dp14196

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().