• DOI:10.1257/app.3.2.67
• Corpus ID: 31236419

Peers, Neighborhoods and Immigrant Student Achievement: Evidence from a Placement Policy

@article{slund2009PeersNA,
  title={Peers, Neighborhoods and Immigrant Student Achievement: Evidence from a Placement Policy},
  author={Olof {\AA}slund and Per-Anders Edin and Peter Fredriksson and Hans Gronqvist},
  journal={Labor: Human Capital eJournal},
  year={2009}
}

• Olof Åslund, Per-Anders Edin, +1 author Hans Gronqvist
• Published 9 November 2009
• Economics
• Labor: Human Capital eJournal

We examine to what extent immigrant school performance is affected by the
characteristics of the neighborhoods that they grow up in. We address this issue using a refugee
placement policy which provides exogenous variation in the initial place of residence in Sweden.
The main result is that school performance is increasing in the number of highly educated adults
sharing the subject�s ethnicity. A standard deviation increase in the fraction of high-educated in
the assigned neighborhood raises compulsory school GPA by 0.9 percentile ranks. This
magnitude corresponds to a tenth of the performance gap between refugee immigrant and nativeborn
children.