We survey the recent, fast-growing literature on peer effects in networks. An important recurring theme is that the causal identification of peer effects depends on the structure of the network itself. In the absence of correlated effects, the reflection problem is generally solved by network...

This paper estimates peer effects both from parents to children and from older to younger siblings in academic fields of study in high school. Despite the importance of family peer effects, causal evidence is scarce due to correlated unobservables and a lack of data. Our setting is Sweden, where...

Peer production systems often attract larger communities of paid and unpaid volunteers, who contribute to their respective projects. This chapter examines different underlying motivations that fuel these contributions. It thereby takes a tripartite form and summarizes current literature on 1)...

Relative to adults, adolescents make more welfare-decreasing decisions, especially in the presence of peers. The consequences of these decisions result in substantial individual and societal losses in terms of lives lost, injury, hospitalization costs, and foregone opportunities. In this paper,...

This paper studies how peers in school affect students’ mental health. Guided by a theoretical framework, we find that increasing students’ relative ranks in their cohorts by one standard deviation improves their mental health by 6% of a standard deviation conditional on own ability. These...

Self-concept is all the information and beliefs individuals have about their own characteristics and themselves. Self-Concept refers to domain-specific evaluations of the self. Children can make self-evaluations in many domains of their life. These include academics, athletics, physical...

Social networking has now become an integral part of lives of modern citizens of India. There will hardly be any one who is not aware about at least one social networking site or app, whether he uses that or not. This covers school students also. It has been common now for households to have a...

Social networks play a critical role in determining educational outcomes. However, it has been difficult to fully characterize and estimate peer influence largely due to the empirical challenges in using observational data, especially within the context of multiplex networks. In this paper, we...

Central to the debate about why some poor people remain poor is the enduring question of what role values play in behavior patterns as observed in chronically impoverished families and communities. Young black women who grow up in impoverished families in urban ghettos face some similar...

Any system of primary and secondary schools involves explicit or implicit mechanisms that ration not only financial but also nonfinancial inputs into education production. This chapter focuses primarily on such mechanisms as they relate to the sorting of parents and children into schools and...