Work

Peers, Neighborhoods, and Immigrant Student Achievement: Evidence from a Placement Policy

Year: 2011

Type: article

Abstract: Immigrants typically perform worse than other students in the OECD countries. We examine to what extent this is due to the population characteristics of the neighborhoods that immigrants grow up in. We address this issue using a governmental refugee placement policy which provides exogenous variation in the initial place of residence in Sweden. The main result is that, for a given share of immigrants in a neighborhood, immigrant school performance is increasing in the number of highly educated adults sharing the subjects ethnicity. A standard deviation increase in the fraction of highly educated adults in the assigned neighborhood increases compulsory school GPA by 0.9 percentile ranks. This magnitude corresponds to a tenth of the gap in student performance between refugee immigrant and native-born children. We also provide tentative evidence that the overall share of immigrants in the neighborhood has a negative effect on GPA.

Source: American Economic Journal Applied Economics

DOI: 10.1257/app.3.2.67

Authors: Olof Åslund, Per-Anders Edin, Peter Fredriksson, Hans Grönqvist

Institutions: IZA - Institute of Labor Economics, Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy, Uppsala University, Stockholm University

Language: English

Topic: Education and experiences of immigrants and refugees

Subfield: Education

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Reduced inequalities, Quality education

Open Access status: green

OpenAlex ID: W2170987691

FWCI: 12.26

Cites: 42

Cited by: 54

Related to: 10