Peers' Composition Effects in the Short and in the Long Run: College Major, College Performance and Income

Massimo Anelli and Giovanni Peri

No 9119, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: In this paper we use a newly constructed dataset following 30,000 Italian individuals from high school to labor market and we analyze whether the gender composition of peers in high school affected their choice of college major, their academic performance and their labor market income. We leverage the fact that the composition of high school classmates (peers), within school-cohort and teacher-group, was not chosen by the students and it was as good as random. We find that male students graduating from classes with at least 80% of male peers were more likely to choose "prevalently male" (PM) college majors (Economics, Business and Engineering). However, this higher propensity to enroll in PM majors faded away during college (through transfers and attrition) so that men from classes with at least 80% of male peers in high school did not have higher probability of graduating in PM majors. They had instead worse college performance and did not exhibit any difference in income or labor market outcomes after college. We do not find significant effects on women.

Keywords: choice of college major; gender; high school; peer effects; academic performance; wages (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J16 J24 J31 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2015-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-edu, nep-hrm, nep-lma and nep-spo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published - published in: Economic Journal, 2019, 129 (618), 553-602

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp9119.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Peers’ Composition Effects in the Short and in the Long Run: College Major, College Performance and Income (2015)
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:iza:izadps:dp9119

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().