Does the Rotten Child Spoil His Companion? Spatial Peer Effects Among Children in Rural India

Christian Helmers () and Manasa Patnam

No 40, Proceedings of the German Development Economics Conference, Berlin 2011 from Verein für Socialpolitik, Research Committee Development Economics

Abstract: This paper identifies the effect of neighborhood peer groups on childhood skill acquisition using observational data. We incorporate spatial peer interaction, defined as a child's nearest geographical neighbors, into a production function of child cognitive development in Andhra Pradesh, India. Our peer group definition takes the form of networks, whose structure allows us to separately identify endogenous peer effects and contextual effects. We exploit variation over time to avoid confounding correlated with social effects. Our results suggest that spatial peer and neighborhood effects are strongly positively associated with a child's cognitive skill formation. Further, we find that the presence of peer groups helps provide insurance against the negative impact of idiosyncratic shocks to child learning. We show that peer effects are robust to different specifications of peer interactions and investigate the sensitivity of our estimates to potential mis-specification of the network structure using Monte Carlo experiments.

Keywords: Children; peer effects; cognitive skills; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 O15 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-ure
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Related works:
Journal Article: Does the rotten child spoil his companion? Spatial peer effects among children in rural India (2014)
Working Paper: Does the rotten child spoil his companion?: spatial peer effects among children in rural india (2011)
Working Paper: Does the Rotten Child Spoil His Companion? Spatial Peer Effects Among Children in Rural India (2010)
Working Paper: Does the Rotten Child Spoil His Companion? Spatial Peer Effects Among Children in Rural India (2010)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:gdec11:40

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