Renzo Severino (Practice JMT) - Public Policy
Who Else is New? Immigrants, New Students, and Academic Performance in Peru
Date: 11/01/2024 (Fri)
Time: 12:00pm- 1:30pm
Location: Seminar will be held on-site: Social Sciences 111
Organizer: Renzo Severino
Meeting Schedule: (Not currently open for scheduling. Please contact the seminar organizer listed above.)
All meetings will be held in the same location as the seminar unless otherwise noted.
12:00pm - Seminar Presentation (12:00pm to 1:30pm)
Additional Comments: Abstract: This article examines the impact of a large and rapid immigration flow on the academic performance of native high school students. I use quasi-random variation in classroom assignment within school-year units to identify the effect of an additional Venezuelan classmate on Peruvians' eighth-grade standardized scores. I find that an additional immigrant student reduces the academic performance of locals by 1.8% and 1.2% of a standard deviation in math and reading, respectively. These effects are not explained by resource dilution, are robust to the possibility of classroom assignment of immigrants being related to past academic performance of natives and are also stable across subnational regions and between the public and private school systems. I find that these impacts are equivalent in size to the impact of new native students being assigned to a classroom. I then explore whether changes in teacher or student behavior may explain the effects. I observe no effect heterogeneity by teacher experience and some evidence of a decrease in native student effort after the introduction of a new student - regardless of nationality.