GY305 Week 4 Reading

Everybody needs Goods Neighbours? Evidence from stundent’s outcomes in England

Stephen Gibbons, Olmo Silva, Felix Weinhardt

http://ftp.iza.org/dp5980.pdf

Paper seeks to estimate the effects of neighbours characteristics and prior achievements n
teenage student’s education and behavioural outcomes using census data on several
cohorts of secondary school students in England. Overall, results provide evidence that
peers in the neighbourhood have no effect on test scores but have a small effect on
behavioural outcomes, such as attitudes towards schooling and anti-social behaviour.

Introduction
 Evidently significant disparities between achievements, behaviour and aspirations of
children growing up in different neighbourhoods (Lupton et al, 2009)
 Nearly all studies in the field- try to learn about neighbourhood effects from the
statistical associates between individual outcomes and the socioeconomic
composition of the neighbourhood in which they live – three pervasive obstacles
o Non-random sorting of residents into dif neighbourhoods means individual
and neighbourhood characteristics are correlated through non-casual
channels- don’t know if its correlated with neighbourhood or individual
o Neighbourhoods that differ in terms of socioeconomic composition potential
differ among different characteristics – which are often unobserved
o Uncertainties in practical limitation in how to define their reference groups
within which individuals interact
 Residential sorting is an issue- because characteristics of children are closely
interwoven with those of their parents, who choose to live based on amenities and
services, disposable income and other constraints.
 Literature shows that people are willing to pay a premium to access better schools
 This sorting means that one child‟s characteristics – both observed and unobserved
– will be correlated with those of his/her neighbours, confounding the causal
influence of neighbours with children‟s and their parents‟ own inherent attributes.
o tackles the problems of sorting and confounding neighbourhood attributes by
exploiting changes in neighbourhood composition induced by the migration
of residential „movers‟ in a population of school-age families.
o
The UK’s housing crises
Henry Overman
http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cp382.pdf
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http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cp257.pdf