<Para ID="Par1">This paper examines how peer quality within distinct college majors affects graduation rates and major persistence. To mitigate the selection problem, we control for school-specific fixed effects, as well as very flexible application-admissions pattern fixed effects. Non-science peer quality...</para>

During the last thirty years education researchers have developed models for judging the comparative performance of schools, in studies of what has become known as “differential school effectivenessâ€. A great deal of empirical research has been carried out to understand why differences...

We look at the effects of physical activity (PA) recommendation policies by considering a social multiplier model in which individuals differ in their concern for PA. The government can either observe this concern (and implement the First Best) or not (and implement a uniform policy). Whichever...

First year students at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, one of the leading Chilean universities, are randomly assigned to their first semester college class groups. This paper takes advantage of this natural experiment in order to robustly estimate the impact of peer...

This chapter summarizes the recent literature on peer effects in student outcomes at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels. Linear-in-means models find modest sized and statistically significant peer effects in test scores. But the linear-in-means model masks considerable...

Users of the social networking service Facebook have the possibility to post status updates for their friends to read. In turn, friends may react to these short messages by writing comments or by pressing a Like button to show their appreciation. Making use of five Swedish accounts, we set up a...

We consider a production function model that transforms worker inputs into outputs through peer effect networks. The distinguishing features of this production model are that the network is formal and observable through worker scheduling, and selection into the network is done by a manager. We...

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this study examines the impact of high school cohort composition on the educational and labor market outcomes of individuals during their early 20s and again during their late 20s and early 30s. We find that the positive...

To date, little is known about the effects of the composition of skills on academic entrepreneurship. Therefore, in this paper, following Lazears (2005) jack-of-all-trades approach, we study how his or her composition of skills affects a scientists intention of becoming an entrepreneur....

We study the influence of peer pressure in multi-dimensional work tasks theoretically and in a controlled laboratory experiment. Thereby, workers face peer pressure in only one work dimension. We find that effort provision increases in the dimension where peer pressure is introduced. However,...