On the peer effects of star students

ABSTRACT

We estimate the effect that star students have on their siblings’ learning outcomes, measured by their high school grade point average (GPA) and their math grades. To this end, we couple administrative school data on grades with an unusual natural experiment in Peru that generates exogenous variation in the presence of star students at home. We find that star students increase their siblings’ GPA by 0.33 SDs and their math grades by 0.22 SDs. The effect size is inversely related to number of siblings, suggesting that the remaining siblings act as substitutes for the star student.

KEYWORDS:

• Education spillovers
• peer effects
• siblings

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I21
• J24
• O15

Acknowledgements

We are thankful to the Office of Monitoring and Strategic Evaluation at the Peruvian Ministry of Education and to Colegio Mayor’s Admissions Office for providing us access to the data used in this article. Any errors are exclusively our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Two interesting exceptions are Dustan (2015) and Goodman et al. (2015) who study how siblings affect school and college choice, respectively.

² Moreira (2016) studies a related phenomenon: the peer effects of star students on their classmates’ performance.

³ In addition, students must have been enrolled in public schools during first and second year of secondary school.

⁴ With the exception of the 2013 process, which had three stages.

⁵ Metropolitan Lima, rest of Lima, Callao, and the remaining 23 regions.

⁶ Admission processes have been used extensively in RD designs. See, e.g., Solis (2017), Smith, Hurwitz, and Avery (2017).

⁷ There were no statistically significant differences in the other subjects or in density across the threshold (not shown due to space constraints).