<p>This dissertation considers the relationship between peer and
individual student interaction. The central finding is that self
reported friends play a crucial role in individual behaviors, a role
that is more significant than other students in their school. Also,
using the network of friendships within a school it is possible to
construct new peer effect measures and account for endogenous peer
group formation. It is however important to distinguish these peer
measures from unobserved individual characteristics that may also
influence behavior.</p><p>The first chapter examines the effect of potentially misidentifying
the reference group on peer effect estimates. The differential
impact of school, grade and friend level peer effects on student
decisions to smoke and drink are calculated. Friendship nominations
come from the Add Health dataset, where students can list up to 10
friends from the school. The bias due to endogenous peer group
formation and simulteneity are considered using various
instrumenting strategies. Peer effects are found to be large and
significant at the friends level for both delinquency variables. It
is possible to show that misidentifying the peer group can result in
peer effect estimates that are understated by as much as 40\%.</p><p>The second chapter of the dissertation further examines the role of
peer interactions, this time considering the effect of popularity on
student academic achievement. Recent work has found a strong
positive relationship between these variables. In this chapter I
ascertain the robustness of these previous findings to controls for
unobserved student heterogeneity using and instrumenting technique
and a structural model. The results indicate that popularity
influences academic achievement positively in the baseline model.
However, instrumenting for popularity or including measures of
unobserved student characteristics results in a large drop in the
effect of popularity, and leads to a significantly negative
coefficient in the majority of cases. Interestingly, popularity
influences future earnings and attitudes positively, where this
effect is robust to the inclusion of unobserved type. Policy
simulations where students are redistributed based on race or income
indicate that the predicted number of friendships and popularity
fall but academic achievement increases. Since student popularity
increases happiness and earnings, the overall effect of the
redistribution policies have to be considered before implementation.</p> / Dissertation
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DUKE/oai:dukespace.lib.duke.edu:10161/673 |
| Date | 23 April 2008 |
| Creators | Mihaly, Kata |
| Contributors | Arcidiacono, Peter |
| Source Sets | Duke University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | 527829 bytes, application/pdf |
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