TY  - JOUR
AU  - Hoxby,Caroline
TI  - Peer Effects in the Classroom: Learning from Gender and Race Variation
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 7867
PY  - 2000
Y2  - August 2000
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7867
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7867.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Caroline M. Hoxby
Department of Economics
Stanford University
Landau Building, 579 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA 94305
Tel: 650-725-8719
Fax: 650-725-5702
E-Mail: choxby@stanford.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2001-04-01
AB  - Peer effects are potentially important for understanding the optimal organization of schools, jobs, and neighborhoods, but finding evidence is difficult because people are selected into peer groups based, in part, on their unobservable characteristics.  I identify the effects of peers whom a child encounters in the classroom using sources of variation that are credibly idiosyncratic, such as changes in the gender and racial composition of a grade in a school in adjacent years.  I use specification tests, including one based on randomizing the order of years, to confirm that the variation I use is not generated by time trends or other non-idiosyncratic forces.  I find that students are affected by the achievement level of their peers:  a credibly exogenous change of 1 point in peers' reading scores raises a student's own score between 0.15 and 0.4 points, depending on the specification.  Although I find little evidence that peer effects are generally non-linear, I do find that peer effects are stronger intra-race and that some effects do not operate through peers' achievement.  For instance, both males and females perform better in math in classrooms that are more female despite the fact that females' math performance is about the same as that of males.
ER  -