This paper identifies the effect of neighborhood peer groups on childhood skill acquisition using observational data. We incorporate spatial peer interaction, defined as a child’s nearest geographical neighbors, into a production function of child cognitive development in Andhra Pradesh,...

Using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), this study analyzes peer effects on obesity in a sample of 3- to 18-year-old children and adolescents in China. Even after a rich set of covariates and unobserved individual heterogeneity are controlled for, it is evident that such...

Children form social ties along dimensions of gender and race/ethnicity, and thus may differ greatly in exposure to peer health and also in reactivity to peer influence. This paper estimates heterogeneity in the peer effects of obesity along dimensions of gender, race/ethnicity, and...

This paper studies the effect of multigrading-mixing children of different ages in the same classroom-on students' short- versus long-term academic achievement in Italy. We cope with the endogeneity of multigrading (and class size) through an instrumental variable identification strategy based...

This paper develops a model that allows for heterogenous contemporaneous peer effects among different types of agents who are endogenously selected into different peer groups. Using our framework, we characterize the reduced-form coefficient in the peer effect literature and show that it is a...