%0 Report
        %A Chakraborty, Tanika
%A Nottmeyer, Olga
%A Schüller, Simone
%A Zimmermann, Klaus F.
        %T Beyond the Average: Peer Heterogeneity and Intergenerational Transmission of Education
        %D 2014
        %8 2014 Dec
        %I Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        %C Bonn
        %7 IZA Discussion Paper
        %N 8695
        %U https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp8695
        %X Estimating the effect of 'ethnic capital' on human capital investment decisions is complicated by the endogeneity of location choice of immigrants and the reflection problem. We exploit a rare immigrant settlement policy in Germany to identify the causal impact of parental peer-heterogeneity on the educational outcomes of their children. To identify the direction of peer effect we restrict to no-child-adult-peers who completed their education much before the children in our sample of interest.
We find that children of low-educated parents benefit significantly from the presence of high-educated neighbors, with more pronounced effects in more polarized neighborhoods and significant gender heterogeneity. In contrast, we do not find any negative influence coming from the low-educated neighbors. Our estimates are robust to a range of flexible peer definitions. Overall, the findings suggest an increase in parental aspirations as the possible mechanism rather than a direct child-to-child peer effect.
        %K policy experiment
%K peer effects
%K immigrant
%K Germany
%K ethnic capital
%K education