Social interactions and college enrollment: A combined school fixed effects/instrumental variables approach

This paper provides some of the first evidence of peer effects in college enrollment decisions. There are several empirical challenges in assessing the influences of peers in this context, including the endogeneity of high school, shared group-level unobservables, and identifying policy-relevant parameters of social interactions models. This paper addresses these issues by using an instrumental variables/fixed effects approach that compares students in the same school but different grade-levels who are thus exposed to different sets of classmates. In particular, plausibly exogenous variation in peers’ parents’ college expectations are used as an instrument for peers’ college choices. Preferred specifications indicate that increasing a student’s exposure to college-going peers by ten percentage points is predicted to raise the student’s probability of enrolling in college by 4 percentage points. This effect is roughly half the magnitude of growing up in a household with married parents (vs. an unmarried household).     

Leaving late: Understanding the extent and predictors of college late departure

Research on college dropout has largely addressed early exit from school, even though a large share of students who do not earn degrees leave after their second year. In this paper, we offer new evidence on the scope of college late departure. Using administrative data from Florida and Ohio, we conduct an event history analysis of the dropout process as a function of credit attainment. Our results indicate that late departure is widespread, particularly at two- and open-admission four-year institutions. We estimate that 14 percent of all entrants to college and one-third of all dropouts completed at least three-quarters of the credits that are typically required to graduate before leaving without a degree. Our results also indicate that the probability of departure spikes as students near the finish line. Amidst considerable policy attention towards improving student outcomes in college, our findings point to promising new avenues for intervention to increase postsecondary attainment.     

Influence flows in the academy: Using affiliation networks to assess peer effects among researchers

Little is known about how influence flows in the academy, because of inherent difficulties in collecting data on large samples of friendship and advice-seeking networks over time. We propose taking advantage of the relative abundance of “affiliation network” data to assess aggregate patterns of how individual and dyadic characteristics channel influence among researchers. We formulate and test our approach using new data on 2034 faculty members at Stanford University over a 15-year period, analyzing different affiliations as potential influence channels for changes in grant productivity. Results indicate that research productivity is more malleable to ongoing interpersonal influence processes than suggested in prior research: a strong, salient tie to a colleague in an authority position is most likely to transmit influence, and most forms of influence are likely to spill over to behaviors outside those jointly produced by collaborators. However, the genders and institutional locations of ego-alter pairs significantly affect how influence flows.     

Cultural capital,teacher bias,and educational success: New evidence from monozygotic twins

In this paper we use new data on Danish monozygotic (MZ) twins to analyze the effect of cultural capital on educational success. We report three main findings. First, cultural capital has a positive direct effect on the likelihood of completing the college-bound track in Danish secondary education. Second, cultural capital leads teachers to form upwardly biased perceptions of children's academic ability, but only when their exposure to children's cultural capital is brief (as in oral and written exams) rather than long (as in grades awarded at the end of the school year). Third, we find that the positive direct effect of cultural capital on educational success is higher for children from high-socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds than for those from low-SES backgrounds. This result suggests that high-SES children are more likely to be in schooling contexts that enable them to convert cultural capital into educational success.     

Neighborhood disorder and individual economic self-sufficiency: New evidence from a quasi-experimental study

This paper draws on data from the Monitoring Mt. Laurel Study, a new survey-based study that enables us to compare residents living in an affordable housing project in a middle-class New Jersey suburb to a comparable group of non-residents. Building on the theoretical and empirical contributions of the Gautreaux and Moving to Opportunity studies, we test the hypothesis that living in this housing project improves a poor person’s economic prospects relative to what they would have experienced in the absence of such housing, and that these improved prospects can be explained at least in part by reduced exposure to disorder and stressful life events. We find that residents in the Ethel Lawrence Homes are significantly less likely to experience disorder and negative life events and that this improvement in circumstances indirectly improves the likelihood of being employed, their earnings, and the share of income from work. We find no relationship between residence in the housing project and the likelihood of using welfare.