Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/284244 
Year of Publication: 
2023
Series/Report no.: 
IFS Working Papers No. 23/18
Publisher: 
Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), London
Abstract: 
High school students from non-elite backgrounds are less likely to have peers with elite educated parents than their elite counterparts in Norway. We show this difference in social capital is a key driver of the high intergenerational persistence in elite education. We identify a positive elite peer effect on enrolment in elite programmes and disentangle underlying mechanisms. Exploiting a lottery in the assessment system, a causal mediation analysis shows the overall positive peer effect reflects a positive effect on application behaviour (conditional on GPA), which dominates a negative effect on student GPA. We consider implications for income mobility finding that encouraging further mixing between elite and non-elite students in high school could improve mobility across the whole distribution.
Subjects: 
Peers
Elite university
Subject choice
Social mobility
Teacher bias
JEL: 
I24
J24
J62
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
745.86 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.