Bad Company: Understanding Negative Peer Effects in College Achievement

Ryan Brady (), Michael Insler () and Ahmed Rahman

Departmental Working Papers from United States Naval Academy Department of Economics

Abstract: Existing peer effects studies produce contradictory findings, including positive, negative, large, and small effects, despite similar contexts. We explore these results using U.S. Naval Academy data covering a 17-year history of the random assignment of students to peer groups. Coupled with students' limited dis- cretion over freshman-year courses, our setting affords an opportunity to better understand peer effects in different social contexts. We find negative effects at the broader "company" level--students' social and residential group--and positive effects at the narrower course-company level within small peer groups. We suggest that peer spillovers change direction because of differences in the underlying mechanism of peer in uence.

Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2016-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-net, nep-soc and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Journal Article: Bad Company: Understanding negative peer effects in college achievement (2017)
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