This paper estimates peer effects in a university context where students are randomly assigned to sections. While students benefit from better peers on average, low-achieving students are harmed by high-achieving peers. Analyzing students' course evaluations suggests that peer effects are driven...

Women have historically been underrepresented in STEM majors and occupations, a gap that has persisted over time. There are concerns that this is related to academic choices made at an earlier age. The purpose of this paper is to examine how social environment affects women's STEM choices as...

This paper studies the relationship between the creative abilities of study peers and academic achievement. We conduct a novel large scale field experiment at university, where students are randomized into work groups based on their score on a creativity test prior to university entry. We first...

We use data from two experiments that randomly assign students to groups to show that, so long as ordinal rank has a causal effect on educational achievement, estimates of the effects of peer ability composition obtained from models that omit rank are downward biased. This finding holds both in...

As children reach adolescence, peer interactions become increasingly central to their development, whereas the direct influence of parents wanes. Nevertheless, parents may continue to exert leverage by shaping their children's peer groups. We study interactions of parenting style and peer...

Business degrees are popular and lead to high earnings. Female business graduates, however, earn less than their male counterparts. These gender differences can be traced back to university, where women shy away from majors like finance that lead to high earnings. In this paper, we investigate...

Despite the prevalence of school tracking, evidence on whether it improves student success is mixed. This paper studies how tracking within high school impacts high-achieving students' short- and longer-term academic outcomes. Our setting is a large and selective Chinese high school, where...

This paper offers new evidence of the role of immigration in shaping the educational and labour market outcomes of natives. We use administrative data on the entire English higher education system and exploit the idiosyncratic variation of foreign students within university-degree across four...

Do the people around us influence our personality? To answer this question, we conduct an experiment with 543 university students who we randomly assign to study groups. Our results show that students become more similar to their peers along several dimensions. Students with more competitive...

We study the long-run effects of income inequality within adolescent peer compositions in schools. We propose a theoretical framework based on reference dependence where inequality in peer groups can generate aspiration gaps. Guided by predictions from this framework we find that an increase in...