
Peer effects in medical school
Using data on the universe of students who graduated from US medical schools between 1996 and 1998, we examine whether the abilities and specialty preferences of a medical school class affect a student's academic achievement in medical school and his choice of specialty. We mitigate the selection problem by including school-specific fixed effects, and show that this method yields an upper bound on peer effects for our data. We estimate positive peer effects that disappear when school-specific fixed effects are added to control for the endogeneity of a peer group. We find no evidence that peer effects are stronger for blacks, that peer groups are formed along racial lines, or that students with relatively low ability benefit more from their peers than students with relatively high-ability. However, we do find some evidence that peer groups form along gender lines. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Duke Scholars
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- Economics
- 1403 Econometrics
- 1402 Applied Economics
- 1401 Economic Theory
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Published In
DOI
ISSN
Publication Date
Volume
Issue
Start / End Page
Related Subject Headings
- Economics
- 1403 Econometrics
- 1402 Applied Economics
- 1401 Economic Theory