Researchers and educators often argue that a student's peers strongly influence his or her educational outcomes. If so, an unequal distribution of advantaged and disadvantaged students across schools in a community will leave many students doubly disadvantaged and amplify existing inequalities....

Since the 1980s, the BC Ministry of Education has offered funding to support the language development of students who speak non-standard dialects of English. In practice, the students who are supported by this funding are almost exclusively Aboriginal, and English as a Second Dialect (ESD)...

We use data on elementary-school students to investigate how the home language and other characteristics of a student's same-grade schoolmates influence that student's academic achievement. We exploit the availability of multiple cohorts of data within each school to control for endogenous...

We use data on students in grades 4–7 in the Canadian province of British Columbia to investigate the effect of having disabled peers on value-added exam outcomes. Longitudinal data for multiple cohorts of students are used together with school-by-grade-level fixed effects to account for...

We examine the contribution of differences in school environments to the gap in education outcomes between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students. We find both substantial school-level segregation of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students and a substantial gap in test scores. Conventional...

We investigate the effects of public school open enrolment, which allows students to enroll in any public school with available space, on fourth grade test scores. We find a small, positive effect on the average student; this benefit appears to stem from increased competition among schools,...

The influence of peer behavior on an individual's choices has received renewed interest in recent years. However, accurate measures of this influence are difficult to obtain. Standard reduced-form methods lead to upwardly biased estimates due to simultaneity, common shocks, and nonrandom peer...

In the well-known `critical mass' model of social interactions, aggregate behaviour exhibits multiple equilibria if the influence of group behaviour on individual behaviour exceeds some fairly high threshold. I demonstrate that this property depends on an implicit assumption that the relevant...

A number of studies have indicated that peer smoking is a highly influential factor in a young person's decision to smoke. However, this finding is suspect, because the studies often fail to account for selection and simultaneity bias. This paper develops an econometric model of youth smoking...