@TechReport{iza:izadps:dp14005,
            	author={Algan, Yann and Dalvit, Nicolò and Do, Quoc-Anh and Chapelain, Alexis Le and Zenou, Yves},
            	title={Friendship Networks and Political Opinions: A Natural Experiment among Future French Politicians},
            	year={2020},
	month={Dec},
            	institution={Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)},
            	address={Bonn},
            	type={IZA Discussion Paper},
            	number={14005},
            	url={https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp14005},
	abstract={We study how social interaction and friendship shape students' political opinions in a natural experiment at Sciences Po, the cradle of top French politicians. We exploit arbitrary assignments of students into short-term integration groups before their scholar cursus, and use the pairwise indicator of same-group membership as instrumental variable for friendship. After six months, friendship causes a reduction of differences in opinions by one third of the standard deviation of opinion gap. The evidence is consistent with a homophily-enforced mechanism, by which friendship causes initially politically-similar students to join political associations together, which reinforces their political similarity, without exercising an effect on initially politically-dissimilar pairs. Friendship affects opinion gaps by reducing divergence, therefore polarization and extremism, without forcing individuals' views to converge. Network characteristics also matter to the friendship effect.},
	keywords={political opinion;polarization;friendship effect;social networks;homophily;extremism;learning;natural experiment},
            }