Carlo Barone, CRIS, Sciences Po (en anglais)

Peer effects are a significant contextual influence on educational attainment. When high-SES students are more frequently surrounded by high-achieving peers due to socio-economic segregation between schools, peer effects can also foster educational inequality. However, most studies of peer effects face two major challenges: students do not select their peers randomly (selection bias) and peer influences tend to be reciprocal (reverse causality). In this paper, we address these challenges by employing a novel peer-of-peer instrumental variable approach to estimate the causal impact of schoo-level peer effects.

Moreover, peer influences on academic achievement have been widely studied, while less is known about how peers influence educational choices. Curricular differentiation is a universal feature of contemporary school systems and a key layer of educational inequality because students from high-SES backgrounds take academically oriented tracks more often. In this study, we analyze social inequalities in curricular choices in England and we identify three explanatory mechanisms: peer effects, prior academic performance and perceived accessibility of higher education.