The composition of peers (i.e., the types of students enrolled at a school) is known to exert a strong influence on parents’ school choices, with important implications for the incentives that school choice programs create for schools. In this paper we document an important source of this demand for peer composition: parents’ concerns about nonacademic dimensions of their child's wellbeing, such as safety and friendships.
- Speaker
- Date
- Friday 4 Apr 2025, 12:00 - 13:15
- Type
- Seminar
- Room
- T1-18
- Building
- Langeveld Building
First, focusing on an urban school district and linking new survey data on parents beliefs about schools to administrative data on their school choices, we show that parents have strong preferences for schools they believe will enhance their child’s nonacademic wellbeing. If anything, these preferences are stronger than their preferences for schools they believe will promote their child’s academic outcomes. Second, investigating the relationship between beliefs and peer composition, we show that beliefs about nonacademic wellbeing respond strongly to peer composition - much more so than beliefs about academics. Since it may be difficult to separate nonacademic wellbeing and peer composition in the minds of parents, our findings underline the challenge posed by peer composition to the effective operation of school choice programmes
About the Speaker
Damon is a Research Associate at the NBER, a Research Fellow at IZA and a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. His main research interest is in the economics of education. Other research interests include labor economics and public economics.
Before joining UCI, Clark was an Assistant Professor at Cornell University, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Princeton University and an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida. He completed his PhD at Oxford University and spent two years at the Center for Labor Economics at UC Berkeley. His research has been widely published in journals such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economics and Statistics, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy.
Registration
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