TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Chakraborty, Tanika
AU  - Nottmeyer, Olga
AU  - Schüller, Simone
AU  - Zimmermann, Klaus F.
        TI  - Beyond the Average: Peer Heterogeneity and Intergenerational Transmission of Education
        PY  - 2014/Dec/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 8695
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp8695
        AB  - 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.
        KW  - policy experiment
KW  - peer effects
KW  - immigrant
KW  - Germany
KW  - ethnic capital
KW  - education
        ER  -