Quantitative Economics
Journal Of The Econometric Society
Edited by: Stéphane Bonhomme • Print ISSN: 1759-7323 • Online ISSN: 1759-7331
Edited by: Stéphane Bonhomme • Print ISSN: 1759-7323 • Online ISSN: 1759-7331
Quantitative Economics: Mar, 2014, Volume 5, Issue 1
Christian Helmers, Manasa Patnam
This paper identifies the effect of neighborhood peer groups on childhood skill acquisition using observational data. We incorporate spatial peer interaction, defined as a child's nearest geographical neighbors, into a production function of child cognitive development in Andhra Pradesh, India. Our peer group definition takes the form of networks, whose structure allows us to identify endogenous peer effects and contextual effects separately. We exploit variation over time to avoid confounding correlated with social effects. Our results suggest that spatial peer and neighborhood effects are strongly positively associated with a child's cognitive skill formation. Further, we explore the effect of peer groups in helping to provide insurance against the negative impact of idiosyncratic shocks to child learning. We find that the data reject full risk-sharing, but cannot rule out the existence of partial risk-sharing on behalf of peers. We show that peer effects are robust to different specifications of peer interactions and investigate the sensitivity of our estimates to potential misspecification of the network structure using Monte Carlo experiments. Keywords. Children, peer effects, cognitive skills, India. JEL classification. C21, O15, R23.
March 5, 2024
The terms of the Editors of the Econometric Society's three journals end June 30, 2025. We are pleased to announce the incoming Editors and to thank the outgoing Editors for their excellent and continuing service.
Econometrica: Since 2019, Guido Imbens has served as the 14th Editor of Econometrica. On July 1, 2025, Marina Halac will become the Editor.
Quantitative Economics: Stéphane Bonhomme has been the Editor of Quantitative Economics since 2021. His successor will be Bernard Salanié.
Theoretical Economics: The Editor of Theoretical Economics since 2021 has been Simon Board. Taking over for him in July 2025 will be Federico Echenique.
Guido, Stéphane, and Simon have been outstanding Editors. We are grateful to them for the work they have done and will continue to do, and we look forward to further congratulating them next year. We believe Marina, Bernard, and Federico will be outstanding successors and we thank them in advance for their service.
Finally, we are grateful to Larry Samuelson for chairing all three search committees, and we thank the search committee members for their hard and fruitful work:
Econometrica: Christian Dustmann, Lars Hansen, Alessandro Lizzeri, George Mailath, Ariel Pakes, Helene Rey, and Elie Tamer.
QE: Kate Ho, Michael Keane, Felix Kubler, Whitney Newey, and Frank Schorfheide.
TE: Jeff Ely, Johannes Horner, Gilat Levy, Meg Meyer, and Ran Spiegler.