Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP5682
Authors: Dominique Goux; Eric Maurin
Abstract: Children's outcomes are strongly correlated with those of their neighbours. The extent to which this is causal is the subject of an extensive literature. An identification problem exists because people with similar characteristics are observed to live in close proximity. Another major difficulty is that neighbourhoods measured in available data are often considerably larger than those which matter for outcomes (i.e. close neighbours). Several institutional features of France enable us to address these problems. We find that an adolescent's performance at the end of junior high-school are strongly influenced by the performance of other adolescents in the neighbourhood.
Keywords: neighbourhood effects; education
JEL Codes: I21; J24
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| proportion of first-grade peers born at the end of the year (C92) | educational advancement of peers at entry into third grade (I24) |
| adolescent's probability of being held back a grade (I21) | adolescents born at the beginning of the year (J13) |
| proportion of neighbors held back a grade at age 15 (I24) | adolescent's probability of repeating a grade between ages 15 and 16 (C29) |