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Which Peers Matter: How Social Ties Affect Peer-group Effects

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Abstract

We study how the achievements of university students are influenced by the characteristics and achievements of peers in individuals’ social networks. Defining peer group in terms of friendship and study partner ties enables us to apply a network regression model and thereby disentangle the influence of peers’ performance from that of peers’ background. We find significant positive peer effects via the academic achievements of friends and study partners. Students’ grades increase with the abilities of study partners, who may or may not also be friends; no such effect is observed for friends who are not also study partners. Additionally, the effects of the abilities of other classmates are found to be insignificant. The results support the claim that peer influence acts mainly through knowledge-sharing channels between students who are connected by social ties.

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Notes

  1. Here autocorrelation coefficient measures interdependence of error terms for different individuals (not interdependence for a single individual over time).

  2. Here, by external shock we mean a change in student achievement due to interventions, such as introducing financial incentives for higher grades, assigning additional classes or improved teaching, which do not affect students and their peers’ predetermined characteristics, such as ability or gender. Changes in student/peer background characteristics (related to achievement) have multiplier effect.

  3. This finding is similar to that of Lin (2010, 2015) who has analyzed the outcomes of secondary school students in the U.S.

  4. The bias may be rather small. Conti et al. (2013), Hsieh and Lee (2015), and Goldsmith-Pinkham and Imbens (2013) have found that network peer effects among secondary school students in the U.S. are quite similar under assumptions of exogenous and endogenous networks.

  5. A more detailed explanation of the testing procedure is given in Online Appendix B.

  6. Since we use point estimates of model (9) coefficients to predict friendship ties, we do not correct the t-statistics which may be underestimated because the same student appears in different pairs.

  7. For directed nominated friendship ties, we consider ordered pairs: for two students A and B there are two ordered pairs, AB and BA. .

  8. Some students have no peers in a sub-group. We create three dummy variables which indicate observations with no peers in the corresponding sub-group.

  9. There is an extensive literature on how the racial environment in the U.S. affects both academic and social networks (see for example, Kao and Thompson 2003; Kuh et al. 2011; Hurtado et al. 2012; Renn 2012; Bowman and Park 2014, 2015).

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Acknowledgments

The article was prepared within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) and supported within the framework of a subsidy granted to the HSE by the Government of the Russian Federation for the implementation of the Global Competitiveness Program.

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  1. Center for Institutional Studies, National Research University Higher School of Economics, 24 Myasnitskaya str., Moscow, Russia, 101000

    Oleg Poldin, Diliara Valeeva & Maria Yudkevich

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  1. Oleg Poldin
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  3. Maria Yudkevich
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Correspondence to Maria Yudkevich.

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Poldin, O., Valeeva, D. & Yudkevich, M. Which Peers Matter: How Social Ties Affect Peer-group Effects. Res High Educ 57, 448–468 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-015-9391-x

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