Bad Company: Reconciling Negative Peer Effects in College Achievement

Ryan Brady (), Michael Insler () and Ahmed Rahman

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Existing peer effects studies produce contradictory findings, including positive, negative, large, and small effects, despite similar contexts. We reconcile these results using U.S. Naval Academy data covering a 22-year history of the random assignment of students to peer groups. Coupled with students' limited discretion over freshman-year courses, our setting affords an opportunity to better understand peer effects in different social networks. We find negative effects at the broader "company" level (students' social and residential group) and positive effects at the narrower course-company level. We suggest that peer spillovers change direction because of differences in the underlying mechanism of peer influence.

Keywords: Peer effects; social network formation; academic achievement; homophily (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D85 I21 I23 I26 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lma, nep-net, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:68354

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