American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
Does Helping John Help Sue? Evidence of Spillovers in Education
American Economic Review
(pp. 1080–1115)
(Complimentary)
Abstract
Does the impact of teachers extend beyond the students in their classroom? Using the natural transitions of students from multiple elementary schools into a single middle school, this paper provides a new method for isolating and quantifying peer spillover effects of teaching and shows that ignoring these spillovers underestimates a teacher's value by at least 30 percent. Because the spillovers also affect teacher value-added estimates, I develop a method of moments estimator of teacher value-added and show that accounting for the spillovers does not have a large impact on the ranking of teachers in New York City. I conclude by showing that the spillovers occur within groups of students who share the same race and gender, which suggests that social networks play a critical role in disseminating the effect.Citation
Opper, Isaac M. 2019. "Does Helping John Help Sue? Evidence of Spillovers in Education." American Economic Review 109 (3): 1080–1115. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20161226Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- H75 State and Local Government: Health; Education; Welfare; Public Pensions
- I21 Analysis of Education
- J15 Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants; Non-labor Discrimination
- J16 Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
- J45 Public Sector Labor Markets
- Z13 Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification