Peer Effects in the Classroom: Learning from Gender and Race Variation

Social and behavioral skills and the gender gap in early educational achievement

“…The superior social and behavioral skills of girls would therefore produce a stronger female advantage in course grades determined through the use of "well-rounded" academic evaluative criteria. Indeed, Hoxby (2000) used exogenous variation in classroom composition to show that boys as well as girls gain on both math and reading achievement from having more girls in the classroom, while Whitmore (2005) obtains similar findings for first and second grades using data from the Tennessee Project STAR experiment. If the greater social and behavioral skills of girls produce spillover effects on standardized tests for both girls and boys, it would seem that the gains that students (whether boy or girl) with high social and behavioral skills produce for themselves are something more than pure bias in teacher evaluation.…”

The Impact of Gender Diversity on the Performance of Business Teams: Evidence from a Field Experiment

“…Performance in this study is academic achievement rather than business outcomes. Other studies looking at peer e ects in education include Hoxby (2000), Lavy and Schlosser (2010) and Oosterbeek and Van Ewijk (2010). company with a pro t objective and shareholders for the duration of one year. Students face strong incentives, both individually and as a team, to perform a substantial and truly joint task of setting up and running a company with the objective of maximizing pro t and shareholder value.…”

Immigrant concentration in schools: Consequences for native and migrant students

“…To establish the causal impact of school composition, an identification approach is needed that takes into account that students and their parents endogenously choose their school and neighborhood. Hoxby (2000) uses variation in the ethnic composition of adjacent cohorts within schools in Texas, so called population variation, and pays special attention to time trends. Her results indicate that the share of black students in class has a negative impact on test scores, in particular for other black students.…”

“…To provide a sensitivity check with respect to unobserved time trends for the analysis of the impact of the share of migrant students in grade, I follow Hoxby (2000) and apply an IV-strategy. The idea is to use unexpected shocks in the share of foreign students (deviations from a trend) in each school as an Instrumental Variable for the main explanatory and possibly endogenous variable.…”