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Peer Effects and Social Networks in Education

Review of Economic Studies 2009 76(4), 1239-1267
We develop a model that shows that, at the Nash equilibrium, the outcome of each individual embedded in a network is proportional to his/her Katz-Bonacich centrality measure. This measure takes into account both direct and indirect friends of each individual, but puts less weight to his/her distant friends. We then bring the model to the data using a very detailed dataset of adolescent friendship networks. We show that, after controlling for observable individual characteristics and unobservable network specific factors, a standard deviation increase in the Katz-Bonacich centrality increases the pupil school performance by more than 7% of one standard deviation.