Working Paper: NBER ID: w9025
Authors: Peter Arcidiacono; Sean Nicholson
Abstract: Using data on the universe of students who graduated from U.S. medical schools between 1996 and 1998, we examine whether the abilities and specialty preferences of a medical school class affect a student's academic achievement in medical school and his choice of specialty. We mitigate the selection problem by including school-specific fixed effects, and show that this method yields an upper bound on peer effects for our data. We estimate positive peer effects that disappear when school-specific fixed effects are added to control for the endogeneity of a peer group. We find no evidence that peer effects are stronger for blacks, that peer groups are formed along racial lines, or that students with relatively low ability benefit more from their peers than students with relatively high ability. However, we do find some evidence that peer groups form along gender lines.
Keywords: No keywords provided
JEL Codes: I21; J24; I11
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| abilities and specialty preferences of a medical school class (I23) | students' performance on the board exam (D29) |
| abilities and specialty preferences of a medical school class (I23) | students' specialty choices (Y80) |
| peer characteristics (C92) | students' performance on the board exam (D29) |
| peer characteristics (C92) | students' specialty choices (Y80) |
| school-specific fixed effects (C23) | peer effects (C92) |
| female peers with higher MCAT verbal scores (I24) | female students' board scores (I24) |
| peer effects (C92) | students' performance on the board exam (D29) |
| peer effects (C92) | students' specialty choices (Y80) |