Peer Effects in European Primary Schools: Evidence from Pirls

By Andreas Ammermueller, Jörn-Steffen Pischke. Social Science Research Network, 2006

219 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We estimate peer effects for fourth graders in six European countries. The identification relies on variation across classes within schools. We argue that classes within primary schools are formed roughly randomly with respect to family background. Similar to previous studies, we find sizeable estimates of peer effects in standard OLS specifications. The size of the estimate is much reduced within schools. This could be explained either by selection into schools or by measurement error in the peer background variable. When we correct for measurement error we find within school estimates close to the original OLS estimates. Our results suggest that the peer effect is modestly large, measurement error is important in our survey data, and selection plays little role in biasing peer effects estimates. We find no significant evidence of non-linear peer effects.

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Citations in the corpus

Ability Peer Effects in University: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment (2016, background): “The first exploits naturally occurring variation in peer group composition (e.g. Hoxby, 2000; Carrell et al., 2009; Ammermueller and Pischke, 2009; De Giorgi et al., 2012; Feld and Zölitz, 2016) and a second, smaller, and more recent literature uses randomized experiments (Duflo et al., 2011;…”
Social Interaction and Sickness Absence (2008, background): “…empirical literature on group effects in such diverse fields as schooling, criminality, shirking within banks, and the choice of pension plans; see, for instance, Ammermueller and Pischke (2006), Sacerdote (2001), Glaeser et al. (1996), and Ichino and Maggie (2000), and Duflo and Saez (2002, 2003).”
Identification of Social Interactions through Partially Overlapping Peer Groups (2010, background): “substantially more complex in our data than in Ammermueller and Pischke (2009). On the one hand, our groups might not include all relevant peers either because of the few”
Peer Effects in Education: How Might They Work, How Big Are They and How Much Do We Know Thus Far? (2011, background): “Several additional studies estimate linear-in-means models outside the U.S. Ammermueller and Pischke (2006) use data encompassing six European countries and find an average coefficient on peer achievement (b1) of 0.11.”
Does Immigration Affect the Long-Term Educational Outcomes of Natives? Quasi-Experimental Evidence (2009, unknown): “In terms of identification strategy, the papers closest to our own are those of Hoxby (2000a) and Ammermueller and Pischke (2006).”