Current Institutional Affiliation
Senior Visiting Research Scientist, Rural Education Action Program, Stanford University

Award Information

International Dissertation Research Fellowship 2003
Institutional Affiliation (at time of award):
Economics, University of California / Berkeley
The Impact of Peer Group Influence and School Quality on Educational Performance: Insights from Middle School Education of Beijing's Eastern City

In my dissertation series, I will use a unique data set to measure impact of school resources and identity (both constitute measure of school quality) on the education performance of middle school students in Beijing's Eastern City District, as well as the peer effects among those students. The unusually rich information contained in the data set enables me to use measures of school and teacher characteristics and specifications of peer groups that cannot be used in existing literature due to limitations of data availability. The identification strategies come from the fact students are randomly assigned to different middle schools conditional on their applications, and using asymmetric relational distance between students. Through this research, I hope to find out the school resources that are important to educational outcome, whether identity plays an important role or not, and the nature of peer impacts.

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