Peer Effects of Immigrant Children on Academic Performance of Native Speakers: Introduction
介绍了一项研究，利用英格兰和荷兰的高质量数据，探讨移民儿童是否对母语学生的学业成绩产生负面影响，并分析了同侪效应的因果识别问题。
Many immigrant children start school with little or no knowledge of the language of instruction. Often, they also have a different religion and ethnicity, and their parents are poorly educated. Not surprisingly, perhaps, some natives are concerned about sending their children to schools with a high fraction of immigrants. But does the presence of immigrant children actually harm the academic achievement of native students? The articles in this Feature use high quality data from two different countries – England and the Netherlands – to answer this question. The impact of immigrant children on native classmates is a special case of a peer interaction effect. At least since the famous Coleman Report issued in 1966, education analysts have argued that peer effects are an important feature of the education system. Despite this strong prior belief, evidence on the causal effect of peers is mixed (Sacerdote, 2011). The problem is that peers are almost never randomly assigned. This is particularly true in the case of immigrant children, since these children often live in ethnically concentrated neighbourhoods. Moreover, Geay, McNally and Telhaj's analysis suggests that native parents often move their children out of high‐immigrant schools – a phenomenon that has also been documented by Casio and Lewis (2012) for the US.