The Impact of Peer Effects on Student Outcomes in New York City Public Schools

Jeffrey Zabel

Education Finance and Policy, 2008, vol. 3, issue 2, 197-249

Abstract: The impact of peers on student outcomes has important policy implications for how students are organized into classes and the overall impact of education interventions. But it is difficult to accurately measure peer effects because of the nonrandom sorting of students and teachers into classrooms and the endogeneity of peers' achievement. In this study, an education production function (EPF) is specified that includes student and peer characteristics as regressors. This model is estimated using student-level data from New York City public schools for 1995–2000. The richness of these data allows six sources of bias that arise in the EPF model to be addressed, including the above-mentioned nonrandom classroom assignment and the endogeneity of peers' achievement. This results in credible evidence of (small) peer group effects. Instrumenting for the mean of peers' achievement significantly reduces the associated peer effect. Nonlinear peer group effects are evident in the form of a small positive impact associated with the homogeneity of peers' achievement. Generally, peer characteristics do not appear to affect individual performance. Also included in this analysis is an application of a new methodology developed by Graham (2007) that identifies peer group effects through their impact on the variance in classroom mean test scores. The approach is less susceptible to the six biases that plague the EPF approach. The evidence from this exercise indicates that peer group effects are present and corroborates the results from the EPF approach. © 2008 American Education Finance Association

Keywords: peer effects; peer impact; student outcomes; student achievement; education production function; New York Public Schools (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 I21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/edfp.2008.3.2.197 (application/pdf)
Access to PDF is restricted to subscribers.

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:edfpol:v:3:y:2008:i:2:p:197-249

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1557-3060

Access Statistics for this article

Education Finance and Policy is currently edited by Stephanie Riegg Cellini and Randall Reback

More articles in Education Finance and Policy from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().