Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP15933
Authors: David Figlio; Paola Giuliano; Riccardo Marchingiglio; Umut Ozek; Paola Sapienza
Abstract: We study the effect of exposure to immigrants on the educational outcomes of US-born students, using a unique dataset combining population-level birth and school records from Florida. This research question is complicated by substantial school selection of US-born students, especially among White and comparatively affluent students, in response to the presence of immigrant students in the school. We propose a new identification strategy to partial out the unobserved non-random selection into schools, and find that the presence of immigrant students has a positive effect on the academic achievement of US-born students, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Moreover, the presence of immigrants does not affect negatively the performance of affluent US-bornstudents, who typically show a higher academic achievement compared to immigrant students. We provide suggestive evidence on potential channels.
Keywords: immigrant students; educational attainment
JEL Codes: I21; I24; J15
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Presence of immigrant students (F22) | Academic achievement of affluent us-born students (I24) |
| Higher-performing immigrant peers (I24) | Performance of us-born students (D29) |
| Exposure to immigrant students (I24) | Academic achievement of us-born students (I24) |
| Cumulative exposure to immigrant students (J82) | Academic achievement of us-born students (I24) |