It Takes a Village: The Economics of Parenting with Neighborhood and Peer Effects

Francesco Agostinelli (), Matthias Doepke, Giuseppe Sorrenti and Fabrizio Zilibotti ()
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Francesco Agostinelli: University of Pennsylvania
Fabrizio Zilibotti: Yale University

No 2020-024, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group

Abstract: As children reach adolescence, peer interactions become increasingly central to their development, whereas the direct influence of parents wanes. Nevertheless, parents may continue to exert leverage by shaping their children's peer groups. We study interactions of parenting style and peer effects in a model where children's skill accumulation depends on both parental inputs and peers, and where parents can affect the peer group by restricting who their children can interact with. We estimate the model and show that it can capture empirical patterns regarding the interaction of peer characteristics, parental behavior, and skill accumulation among US high school students. We use the estimated model for policy simulations. We find that interventions (e.g., busing) that move children to a more favorable neighborhood have large effects but lose impact when they are scaled up because parents' equilibrium responses push against successful integration with the new peer group.

Keywords: busing; neighborhood effects; peer effects; skill development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 J13 J24 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-net, nep-ore and nep-ure
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http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Agosti ... -takes-a-village.pdf First version, April 2020 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: It Takes a Village: The Economics of Parenting with Neighborhood and Peer Effects (2020)
Working Paper: It Takes a Village: The Economics of Parenting with Neighborhood and Peer Effects (2020)
Working Paper: It Takes a Village: The Economics of Parenting with Neighborhood and Peer Effects (2020)
Working Paper: It Takes a Village: The Economics of Parenting with Neighborhood and Peer Effects (2020)
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