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  3. American Economic Review
  4. March 2019
  5. Does Helping John Help Sue? Evidence of Spillovers in Education

Does Helping John Help Sue? Evidence of Spillovers in Education

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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.20161226

Additional 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