Three Essays On Learning And Strategic Interaction

Author : Rokhaya Dieye
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 120 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (113 download)

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Download or read book Three Essays on Social Interactions and Education written by Rokhaya Dieye and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this thesis is to investigate identification of peer effects and their application on a large set of outcomes, going from school attendance to obesity. The relevance of this research relies on three main points: 1) it allows better measurrement of effects stemming from social interactions, thus providing some answer to the numerous econometric issues that make the study of peer effects a lot challenging; 2) it improves our comprehension of negative social phenomena, including the incidence of school dropouts and obesity; 3) it proposes better public policies aiming at fighting against such phenomena by exploiting social network effects that contribute to amplify them. The different objectives of this thesis are investigated in three different chapters. The first chapter proposes a new strategy for estimating the influence of the social network on individual decisions in a network context using randomized experiments. It combinates the structural social network model developed by Bramoullé et al. [2009] and randomized experiments. New identification conditions that mostly require balance in the characteristics of friends between treatment and control groups are provided. The model is estimated and validated on experimental data collected for the evaluation of a scholarship program in Colombia. By design, randomization is at the student-level. Friendship data reveals that treated and untreated students interact together. Besides providing evidence of peer effects in schooling, the chapter concludes that ignoring peer effects would have led to an overestimation of the program actual impact. The aim of the second chapter is to propose a model that accounts for heterogeneity in peer effects between individual categories in a network setting. Identification conditions of a network-based interactions model that generalizes the one proposed by Bramoullé et al. [2009] are derived, and heterogeneity of peer effects is allowed within and between categories of individuals. Using the Add-Health dataset, the study explores heterogeneity in adolescents weight using both gender and racial categorizations. The results show that the positive endogenous effect found using the homogeneous model is actually heterogeneous when considering both gender and racial categorizations, as for example, females seem to be more influenced by their female friends than by their male friends. While the first two chapters consider friendship networks in an attempt to identify the effects that result from social interactions, the third chapter considers the course-overlaps network. The model is local agregate and has the feature, unlike other studies of peer effects, that the interaction matrix accounts for the extensive and intensive margins. Interactions of this type are better to design school policies. The chapter then proceeds to estimation of peer effects in overall GPA and GPAs in both mathematics and science courses using the Add Heakth and AHAA datasets. The results reveal the presence of positive and significant social interaction effects using both 2SLS and GMM estimation techniques.