Peer effects of non-native students on natives' educational outcomes: mechanisms and evidence

摘要

This paper analyzes whether the share of non-native students in a school determines externalities that affect natives' educational outcomes. The identification strategy exploits the variation in the non-native school share between adjacent cohorts by using administrative data covering the census of Italian junior high schools. Our results show that the non-native school share has weak negative impact on the test scores of native peers: Increasing the non-native school share by 1 percentage point leads to a decrease of 0.043 % in native peers' language school mean test scores, while no effect is detected for math. The effects are also highly nonlinear and marginally increasing with level of the non-native school share. Our findings are consistent with, though not direct evidence of, an 'integration model' of peer interactions between native and non-native students.