Does the rotten child spoil his companion? : spatial peer effects among children in rural India

  • This paper identifies the effect of neighborhood peer groups on childhood skill acquisition using observational data. We incorporate spatial peer interaction, defined as a child's nearest geographical neighbors, into a production function of child cognitive development in Andhra Pradesh, India. Our peer group definition takes the form of networks, whose structure allows us to identify endogenous peer effects and contextual effects separately. We exploit variation over time to avoid confounding correlated with social effects. Our results suggest that spatial peer and neighborhood effects are strongly positively associated with a child's cognitive skill formation. Further, we explore the effect of peer groups in helping to provide insurance against the negative impact of idiosyncratic shocks to child learning. We find that the data reject full risk-sharing, but cannot rule out the existence of partial risk-sharing on behalf of peers. We show that peer effects are robust to different specifications of peer interactions and investigate the sensitivity of our estimates to potential misspecification of the network structure using Monte Carlo experiments.

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Author:Christian Helmers, Manasa Patnam
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-438398
DOI:https://doi.org/10.3982/QE192
ISSN:1759-7331
ISSN:1759-7323
Parent Title (English):Quantitative economics
Publisher:Wiley
Place of publication:Oxford [u. a.]
Contributor(s):Orazio Attanasio
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2017/08/31
Year of first Publication:2014
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2017/08/31
Tag:Children; India; cognitive skills; peer effects
Volume:5
Issue:1
Page Number:55
First Page:67
Last Page:121
Note:
Copyright © 2014 Christian Helmers and Manasa Patnam. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License 3.0. Available at http://www.qeconomics.org.
HeBIS-PPN:428739873
Institutes:Wirtschaftswissenschaften / Wirtschaftswissenschaften
Exzellenzcluster / Exzellenzcluster Die Herausbildung normativer Ordnungen
Dewey Decimal Classification:3 Sozialwissenschaften / 36 Soziale Probleme, Sozialdienste / 360 Soziale Probleme und Sozialdienste; Verbände
Sammlungen:Universitätspublikationen
Licence (German):License LogoCreative Commons - Namensnennung-Nicht kommerziell 3.0