EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Do Peers Affect Student Achievement in China's Secondary Schools?

Weili Ding and Steven Lehrer ()

No 12305, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Peer effects have figured prominently in debates on school vouchers, desegregation, ability tracking and anti-poverty programs. Compelling evidence of their existence remains scarce for plaguing endogeneity issues such as selection bias and the reflection problem. This paper firmly establishes a link between peer performance and student achievement, using a unique dataset from China. We find strong evidence that peer effects exist and operate in a positive and nonlinear manner; reducing the variation of peer performance increases achievement; and our semi-parametric estimates clarify the tradeoffs facing policymakers in exploiting positive peers effects to increase future achievement.

JEL-codes: I2 P36 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-dev, nep-edu, nep-sea, nep-soc, nep-tra and nep-ure
Note: ED
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Published as Weili Ding & Steven F Lehrer, 2007. "Do Peers Affect Student Achievement in China's Secondary Schools?," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 89(2), pages 300-312, 02.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w12305.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Do Peers Affect Student Achievement In China's Secondary Schools? (2005) Downloads
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:nbr:nberwo:12305

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w12305

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:12305