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Using Compulsory Mobility to Identify School Quality and Peer Effects
Author(s) -
Kramarz Francis,
Machin Stephen,
Ouazad Amine
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
oxford bulletin of economics and statistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.131
H-Index - 73
eISSN - 1468-0084
pISSN - 0305-9049
DOI - 10.1111/obes.12076
Subject(s) - peer effects , sorting , compulsory education , quality (philosophy) , sort , production (economics) , exploit , demographic economics , psychology , economics , social psychology , microeconomics , pedagogy , computer science , philosophy , computer security , epistemology , information retrieval , programming language
Education production functions that feature school and student fixed effects are identified using students' school mobility. However, student mobility is driven by factors like parents' labour market shocks and divorce. Movers experience large achievement drops, are more often minority and free meal students, and sort endogenously into peer groups and school types. We exploit an English institutional feature whereby some students must change schools between grades 2 and 3. We find no evidence of endogenous sorting of such compulsory movers across peer groups or school types. Non‐compulsory movers bias school quality estimates downward by as much as 20% of a SD.