Better Together? Social Networks in Truancy and the Targeting of Treatment
利用行政数据构建逃学学生的社交网络，发现学生系统性协调缺勤，且家长信息干预对同伴产生溢出效应，忽略该效应会低估干预成本效益43%，表明可利用网络更高效地分配干预资源。
There is concern that the risky behaviors of teenagers, such as truancy, negatively influence the behaviors of others through their social networks. We use administrative data to construct social networks based on students who are truant together. We simulate these networks to document that certain students systematically coordinate their absences. We validate them by showing that a parent information intervention on student absences has spillover effects from treated students onto their peers. Excluding these effects understates the intervention’s cost-effectiveness by 43%. We show that there is potential to use networks to target interventions more efficiently given a budget constraint.