Does Helping John Help Sue? Evidence of Spillovers in Education

Isaac M. Opper

American Economic Review, 2019, vol. 109, issue 3, 1080-1115

Abstract: Does the impact of teachers extend beyond the students in their classroom? Using the natural transitions of students from multiple elementary schools into a single middle school, this paper provides a new method for isolating and quantifying peer spillover effects of teaching and shows that ignoring these spillovers underestimates a teacher's value by at least 30 percent. Because the spillovers also affect teacher value-added estimates, I develop a method of moments estimator of teacher value-added and show that accounting for the spillovers does not have a large impact on the ranking of teachers in New York City. I conclude by showing that the spillovers occur within groups of students who share the same race and gender, which suggests that social networks play a critical role in disseminating the effect.

JEL-codes: H75 I21 J15 J16 J45 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
Note: DOI: 10.1257/aer.20161226
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

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