Time: December 25, 2019 (Wednesday), 12:00-13:30

Venue: 1629, Rear Main Building, Beijing Normal University

Speaker: Hu Zihan (PhD student, Cornell University)

Host: Li Yanan

Topic：Negative Peer Effects under Competition: Evidence from a University in China

Abstract：How incentive structures influence peer effects in education is an important question, but one which is heavily understudied. We investigate peer effects under competition, using administrative data from a university in China where students face fierce competition for annual GPA-determined scholarships. Exploiting a random assignment of students to dormitories, we find that living with more high-ability (measured by the College Entrance Exam scores) roommates significantly decreases students’ academic performance during college. More importantly, this negative peer effect increases significantly when the competition environment becomes more intense along four various dimensions: 1) whether they are both good enough to be potential winners of the scholarship competition; 2) whether they are direct competitors with each other (sharing the same major); 3) how close are their initial ability measurements; 4) relative number of competitors inside and outside a dorm room. We further show that these results could not be explained by the self-esteem mechanism. Our findings highlight that competition changes the nature of peer interaction. They suggest a low-cost way to potentially improve student performance within the world’s largest school system through optimizing dormitory allocation.

About the Speaker

Hu Zihan is a PhD student in the Department of Economics and Public Policy and Management at Cornell University.  His current research interests are labor economics and health economics in developing countries. He is the winner of the 2019 Red Wilson Excellence in Economics Medal from Cornell University and the Gregory Chow Best Paper Award from the Chinese Society for Economics in the United States in 2018.