The impact of peer personality on academic achievement

Bart Golsteyn (), Arjan Non and Ulf Zölitz

No 269, ECON - Working Papers from Department of Economics - University of Zurich

Abstract: This paper provides evidence of a novel facet of peer effects by showing how peer personality affects educational achievement. We exploit random assignment of students to university sections and find that students perform better in the presence of more persistent peers and more risk-averse peers. In particular, low-persistence students benefit from highly-persistent peers without devoting additional efforts to studying. However, highly-persistent students are not affected by the persistence of their peers. The personality peer effects that we document are distinct from other observable peer characteristics and suggest that the personality traits of peers causally affect human capital accumulation.

Keywords: Personality; peer effects; non-cognitive skills (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I24 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-edu, nep-hrm, nep-net and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Related works:
Journal Article: The Impact of Peer Personality on Academic Achievement (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zur:econwp:269

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