There is a debate among social scientists regarding the existence of a peer externality commonly referred to as 'acting white.' Using a newly available data set (the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health), which allows one to construct an objective measure of a student's popularity,...

We exploit data from middle schools in Seoul, South Korea, where students and teachers are randomly assigned to classrooms, and find that female students taught by a female versus a male teacher score higher on standardized tests compared to male students even five years later. We also find that...