Conspicuous Consumption and Within-Group Income Inequality

Individuals engage in conspicuous consumption to signal their income to their own reference groups, defined in a fine manner by observable identifiers such as race, gender, education, and occupation. The more income inequality within a reference group, the less prior information concerning the income of an individual, and hence the more effective the conspicuous consumption signal. Therefore, within-group income inequality causes substitution from non-conspicuous consumption to conspicuous consumption. We find strong evidence supporting this prediction regarding aggregate conspicuous consumption for all income percentiles. Disaggregating into smaller consumption categories, most consumption items categorized by the previous literature as conspicuous and non-conspicuous using survey methods agrees with this prediction as well

Conspicuous Consumption and Within-Group Income Inequality

Individuals engage in conspicuous consumption to signal their income to their own reference groups, defined in a fine manner by observable identifiers such as race, gender, education, and occupation. The more income inequality within a reference group, the less prior information concerning the income of an individual, and hence the more effective the conspicuous consumption signal. Therefore, within-group income inequality causes substitution from non-conspicuous consumption to conspicuous consumption. We find strong evidence supporting this prediction regarding aggregate conspicuous consumption for all income percentiles. Disaggregating into smaller consumption categories, most consumption items categorized by the previous literature as conspicuous and non-conspicuous using survey methods agrees with this prediction as well

Peer Effects in the Classroom: Evidence from New Peers

This thesis investigates the role of classmates in the academic achievement of an individual student. I propose a new strategy to identify ability spillovers and combine this strategy with a unique data set to estimate peer effects in education. Using this innovative approach, I quantify the average effect of peers on own academic achievement in middle school and analyze heterogeneity of own response to peers along ability and gender lines. In Chapter 1, I provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of linear-in-means model of peer interactions and estimate the effect of the average quality of peers on academic progress of six-graders in Ontario public schools. I provide convincing evidence of the validity of my identification strategy and show that the average quality of classmates measured by their lagged test scores matters for individual academic achievement. I find positive, large and significant ability spillovers from peers in the same classroom. To reconcile the broad spectrum of peer effect's estimates in the literature, I also investigate the impact of peers in the same school and grade. I show that once a peer group is aggregated to a grade or class level, the effect attenuates towards zero. In Chapter 2, I relax the main assumption of linear-in-means model and compare alternative models of peer interactions with the empirical results from the first chapter. My findings imply that all students unambiguously benefit from the presence of high achieving peers. At the same time, academic progress of high-achievers does not suffer from the presence of low-achieving classmates. This finding provides important policy implications for ability grouping of students in schools. With the help of a policy experiment I demonstrate that spreading out high ability students across classrooms is an efficient strategy to increase the achievement level of every student. In the third chapter, I introduce gender dimension into the analysis of peer effects and investigate the role of class gender composition on individual academic achievement. I employ two different identification strategies and find that large share of girls in a class facilitates academic progress of both boys and girls. While he average quality of girls is one of the determinants of own achievement, peer-to-peer interactions and improved discipline in a classroom, when more girls are present, also play an important role.Ph

Generational status, immigrant concentration and academic achievement: comparing first and second-generation immigrants with third-plus generation students

Abstract Background Immigrants and their children are the fastest-growing demographic group in the United States, and schools are often the first social institution young immigrants engage with on a sustained basis. As such, the academic achievement of immigrant students can be viewed as an indicator of their incorporation and a predictor of educational and employment outcomes in adulthood. In this study, we examined the factors associated with differences in mathematics achievement between first, second, and third-plus generation students in the US. Methods We analyzed the data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012. Our analytic sample included 3700 15 year-old students attending US public and private schools. We used information on students’ background and school characteristics from the student and school questionnaires. We used multiple linear regression models to predict mathematics achievement. To address the sampling design of PISA and the use of plausible values we fitted the models using the IDB Analyzer. Results Our analysis shows that the families and schools of second-generation students are more similar to their first-generation than their third-plus generation peers. Once we control for student background characteristics and school contextual factors, the achievement gap between first-generation students and their second and third-plus generation peers disappears. Our results suggest that what we observed as generational differences in achievement are more likely to be gender, racial, and socioeconomic gaps. Conclusions Our findings imply that student background and school contextual factors counteract some of the disadvantages that first-generation students face in the US. Our results also support existing evidence about the second-generation advantage in academic achievement. Taken together, these findings suggest that mathematics achievement can be addressed by policies and practices that support all students alongside policies and practices that target immigrant students

725025 – Supplemental material for Keeping Our Best? A Survival Analysis Examining a Measure of Preservice Teacher Quality and Teacher Attrition

<p>Supplemental material, 725025 for Keeping Our Best? A Survival Analysis Examining a Measure of Preservice Teacher Quality and Teacher Attrition by Robert Vagi, Margarita Pivovarova and Wendy Miedel Barnard in Journal of Teacher Education</p