TY  - JOUR
AU  - Arcidiacono,Peter
AU  - Nicholson,Sean
TI  - Peer Effects in Medical School
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 9025
PY  - 2002
Y2  - June 2002
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9025
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9025.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Peter Arcidiacono
Department of Economics
201A Social Sciences Building
Duke University
Durham, NC 27708
Tel: 919/660-1816
Fax: 919/684-8974
E-Mail: psarcidi@econ.duke.edu

Sean Nicholson
Professor
Department of Policy Analysis and Management
Cornell University
102 Martha Van Rensselaer Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
Tel: 607/254-6498
Fax: 607/255-4071
E-Mail: sn243@cornell.edu
AB  - Using data on the universe of students who graduated from U.S. medical schools between 1996 and 1998, we examine whether the abilities and specialty preferences of a medical school class affect a student's academic achievement in medical school and his choice of specialty. We mitigate the selection problem by including school-specific fixed effects, and show that this method yields an upper bound on peer effects for our data. We estimate positive peer effects that disappear when school-specific fixed effects are added to control for the endogeneity of a peer group. We find no evidence that peer effects are stronger for blacks, that peer groups are formed along racial lines, or that students with relatively low ability benefit more from their peers than students with relatively high ability. However, we do find some evidence that peer groups form along gender lines.
ER  -