Peer effects in medical school
Abstract
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.
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/2636Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1016/j.jpubeco.2003.10.006Publication Info
Arcidiacono, P; & Nicholson, S (2005). Peer effects in medical school. Journal of Public Economics, 89(2-3). pp. 327-350. 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2003.10.006. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/2636.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Peter S. Arcidiacono
William Henry Glasson Distinguished Professor of Economics
Professor Arcidiacono specializes in research involving applied microeconomics, applied
economics, and labor economics. His research primarily focuses on education and discrimination.
His work focuses specifically on the exploration of a variety of subjects, such as
structural estimation, affirmative action, minimum wages, teen sex, discrimination,
higher education, and dynamic discrete choice models, among others. He recently received
funding from a National Science Foundation Grant for his pro

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