Peer Effects and Rank Concerns in the Classroom

This paper investigates the mechanisms behind peer effects in the classroom using exogenous variation in study disruptions generated by the 2010 Maule mega-earthquake in Chile (magnitude 8.8, the seventh-largest ever instrumentally recorded). The central research question is why classroom peers can shape academic achievement — specifically, whether beyond production complementarities and a desire to conform, a desire to compete for classroom rank can drive peer influence on learning.

The author constructs a novel dataset linking administrative and survey data from Chile’s Ministry of Education (SIMCE test scores, GPA, curriculum coverage, and school expenditure records) for two cohorts of roughly 150,000 eighth-grade students — one measured in 2009 before the earthquake, one measured in 2011 roughly 20–22 months after — to newly constructed measures of housing damage. Damage to each student’s home is built in three steps: (1) ground-shaking intensity using an established attenuation formula for the 2010 earthquake; (2) seismic vulnerability of each student’s home inferred from a latent-class-analysis model trained on census data linking housing construction materials to vulnerability classes; and (3) a combined expected “damage ratio” (fraction of home that needs to be rebuilt). Identification uses a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits the differential correlation between pre-existing seismic vulnerability and outcomes across the pre- and post-earthquake cohorts, controlling for socioeconomic composition.

Michela Maria Tincani | Macro Paper Warehouse

Peer Effects and Rank Concerns in the Classroom