Centrality-Based Spillover Effects

Yves Zenou, Asad Islam, Michael Vlassopoulos and Xin Zhang

No 16321, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We study the role of social network structure in peer-to-peer educational spillovers by leveraging a two-year field experiment in primary schools in rural Bangladesh. We implement a randomized educational intervention-the provision of free after-school tutoring-offered to a random subsample of students in treatment schools. We exploit the experimentally induced across-classroom variation in the centrality of treated students to provide the first causal evidence of centrality-based spillover effects. We find that a one standard deviation (SD) increase in the average centrality of treated students within a classroom leads to improvements in the test scores of their untreated classmates of 0.57 SD in English and 0.62 SD in math. Further evidence indicates that more central students have higher academic ability, better social skills, and interact more with classmates on matters related to learning, which suggests that they can be more influential for their peers. In addition, we offer the private tutoring intervention to the most central students on a separate group of schools. We find that this targeted approach provides larger educational benefits both for treated and untreated students than the policy that treats a random subset of students. We conclude that targeting the most central students in a network to offer an intervention can be a cost-effective way to improve the educational outcomes of all students in a classroom.

Keywords: Network centrality; Spillovers; Education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 O15 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16321 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

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:cpr:ceprdp:16321

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP16321

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().