Among the key issues of peer effects estimation is the correct identification of relevant peers. In this study, we explore how the individual performance of university students is influenced by characteristics and achievements of peers from individual’s social network. The analysis uses data...

This study examines the relationship between family and school characteristics, and student reading performance; and how these vary across countries with different levels of economic inequality and stratification. Economic inequality is measured with the Gini index and stratification by the...

We estimate peer effects for fourth graders in six European countries. The identification relies on variation across classes within schools. We argue that classes within primary schools are formed roughly randomly with respect to family background. Similar to previous studies, we find sizeable...

In May 1991, 15,000 Ethiopian Jews were brought to Israel in an overnight airlift and sorted in a haphazard and essentially random fashion to absorption centres across the country. This quasi-random assignment produced a natural experiment whereby the initial schooling environment of Ethiopian...

We develop a model that gives some microfoundation to the impact of residential neighborhood on children’s educational attainment and then test it using the UK National Child Development Study. We find that, for high-educated parents, the better the quality of the neighborhood in terms of...

This paper examines the issue of whether workers learn productive skills from their co-workers, even if those skills are unethical. Specifically, we estimate whether Jose Canseco, one of the best baseball players in last few decades, affected the performance of his teammates. In his...

We estimate the influence of classmates’ ability characteristics on student achievement in exogenously formed student groups. The study uses administrative data on undergraduate students at a large selective university in Russia. The presence of high-ability classmates has a positive effect on...

How many "American jobs" have U.S.-born workers lost due to immigration and offshoring? Or, alternatively, is it possible that immigration and offshoring, by promoting cost-savings and enhanced efficiency in firms, have spurred the creation of jobs for U.S. natives? We consider a multi-sector...

We study a model that integrates productive and socialization efforts with network choice and parental investments. We characterize the unique symmetric equilibrium of this game. We first show that individuals underinvest in productive and social effort, but that solving only the investment...