Peer Effects and Human Capital Accumulation: the Externalities of ADD

Anna Aizer ()

No 14354, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Recent work shows that peers affect student achievement, but the mechanisms are not well understood. I show that peer behavior is an important mechanism, perhaps more so than ability, by exploiting exogenous timing in diagnosis/treatment of ADD among peers that improves peer behavior while holding peer achievement constant. Improvements in peer behavior increase student achievement. Moreover, resources mitigate the negative effects of peer behavior. These findings imply that the optimal response in the presence of peer effects is not necessarily to reorganize classrooms. Rather, existing institutions can modify peer effects by improving behavior and/or mitigating the impact of poor behavior.

JEL-codes: I1 I18 I2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-hrm, nep-lab, nep-soc and nep-ure
Date: 2008-09
Note: CH ED HE LS PE
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14354.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14354

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14354
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

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