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Peers, neighborhoods and immigrant student achievement - evidence from a placement policy

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  • Grönqvist, Olof Åslund, Per-Anders Edin, Peter Fredriksson and Hans

    (Department of Economics)

Abstract
Immigrants typically perform worse than other students in the OECD countries. We examine to what extent this is due to the population characteristics of the neighborhoods that immigrants grow up in. We address this issue using a governmental refugee placement policy which provides exogenous variation in the initial place of residence in Sweden. The main result is that, for a given share of immigrants in a neighborhood, immigrant school performance is increasing in the number of higly educated adults sharing the subject's ethnicity. A standard deviation increase in the fraction of highly educated adults in the assigned neighborhood increases compulsory school GPA by 0.9 percentile ranks. This magnitude corresponds to a tenth of the gap in student performance between refugee immigrant and native-born children. We also provide tentative evidence that the overall share of immigrants in the neighborhood has a negative effect on GPA.

Suggested Citation

  • Grönqvist, Olof Åslund, Per-Anders Edin, Peter Fredriksson and Hans, 2009. "Peers, neighborhoods and immigrant student achievement - evidence from a placement policy," Working Paper Series 2009:17, Uppsala University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:uunewp:2009_017
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Peer effects; Ethnic enclaves; Immigration; School performance;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General
    • J15 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants; Non-labor Discrimination
    • Z13 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification

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