We study how the achievements of university students are influenced by the characteristics and achievements of peers in individuals’ social networks. Defining peer group in terms of friendship and study partner ties enables us to apply a network regression model and thereby disentangle the...

Social influence is an important factor in learning and decision making. We estimate peer influence on student choice of specialization using data on undergraduate students of a Russian university. Information about individual social ties has been gathered from a questionnaire survey. We show...

We estimate the influence of classmates' ability characteristics on student achievement in exogenously formed student groups. The study uses administrative data on undergraduate students at a large selective university in Russia. The presence of high-ability classmates has a positive effect on...

Social interactions with peers during learning have a significant impact on university students' academic achievement. As social ties are voluntary, an empirical estimation of peer effects is exposed to a potential endogeneity problem. To overcome this issue, we propose to define the peer group...