Journal of Public Economics

Authors:

Marco Bertoni - dSEA Unipd

Roberto Nisticò - University of Naples “Federico II” and CSEF

Parents and families tend to have a preference for enrolling their kids in schools where there is a high prevalence of high ability peers. This happens because they hope to benefit from interactions with highly talented students by means of spillover effects. 

Is this hope of students and parents well-grounded in the empirical evidence?

Empirical evidence suggests that high exposure to high ability peers is positive for individual achievement but that these effects are small in magnitude as it also decreases students’ academic self-concept because of lower ordinal ability rank. 

In this paper, the authors show that the magnitude of the peer effects is higher than what was previously thought.

Read the full article here: https://unipd.link/Paper_Bertoni_peer_effects