Does Immigration Affect the Long-Term Educational Outcomes of Natives? Quasi-Experimental Evidence

By Eric D. Gould, Victor Lavy, Christopher R. Taber, Steve Pischke. Social Science Research Network, 2009

289 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper uses the mass migration wave to Israel in the 1990s to examine the impact of immigrant concentration during elementary school on the long-term academic outcomes of native students in high school. To identify the causal effect of immigrant children on their native peers, the empirical strategy must address two sources of bias: the endogenous sorting of immigrants across schools, and the endogenous grade placement of immigrants within schools. We control for the endogeneity of immigrant placement across schools by conditioning on the total number of immigrants in a school and exploit random variation in the number of immigrants across grades within the same school. To address the endogenous grade placement of immigrants within schools, we use the immigrants' dates of birth as an instrument for their actual grade placement. The results suggest that the overall presence of immigrants in a grade had a significant and large adverse effect on two important outcomes for Israeli natives: the dropout rate and the chances of passing the high school matriculation exam which is necessary to attend college.

Subfields: Demography, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f9a0f6f13cf5696444a5f741e72db1928d2377fc

Citations in the corpus

• School Context and the Gender Gap in Educational Achievement (2012, unknown): “of gender or race composition) for the same school and grade (Hoxby, 2000; Gould et al., 2009), though these studies have not looked at peer effects related to socioeconomic characteristics.”
• The Economic Consequences of the International Migration of Labor (2008, unknown): “After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a massive migration of Russian Jews to Israel, which increased the Israeli population by 12% in the span of just four years.”
• Immigration and prices: quasi-experimental evidence from Syrian refugees in Turkey (2016, unknown): “Gould et al. (2009) investigate the impact of immigration on long-term educational outcomes.”
• Peer Effects in Microenvironments: The Benefits of Homogeneous Classroom Groups (2014, unknown): “…to estimate peer effects ðHanushek et al. 2003; Angrist and Lang 2004; Arcidiacono and Nicholson 2005; Hoxby and Weingarth 2006; Lyle 2007; Ammermueller and Pischke 2009; Gould, Lavy, and Paserman 2009Þ, and others explore living arrangements among college students ðSacerdote 2001; Zimmerman 2003Þ.”
• The Impact of Immigration on the Educational Attainment of Natives (2017, unknown): “Also relevant for my research are the mixed results in several papers examining the impact of immigrants on native test scores in Europe and Israel: Gould, Lavy, and Paserman (2009); Jensen and Rasmussen (2011); Brunello and Rocco (2013); Geay,McNally, and Telhaj (2013); Ohinata and vanOurs (2013).”
• Under Pressure? The Effect of Peers on Outcomes of Young Adults (2010, unknown): “Lavy and Schlosser (2007), Bifulco, Fletcher, and Ross (2010), and Gould, Lavy, and Paserman (2009).”
• Peer Effects in European Primary Schools: Evidence from Pirls (2006, unknown): “The bias from correlated effects is thus removed and λ can be estimated consistently.”
• Non-Native Speakers of English in the Classroom: What are the Effects on Pupil Performance? (2012, unknown): “This follows Gould et al. (2009) and is intended to capture changes occurring within the school as a whole rather than the peer group of interest (i.e. non-native speakers in the same year group as native speakers).”