Essays in Education Economics

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on Venezuelan immigrant students who arrived in Peru between 2015 and 2019. The number of Venezuelan students in Peruvian high schools increased exponentially in this period, surpassing the number of all other foreign students combined. Venezuelan students would interact with local students, other immigrant students, and Peruvian teachers. I explore two questions related to these interactions: (1) What was the effect, if any, of increased Venezuelan presence in Peruvian classrooms on the academic performance of local students? And (2) To what extent teachers graded Venezuelan immigrants differently than Peruvian students?Chapter 2 provides evidence of immigrant peer effects in a context that is largely unexplored in the literature. I use student-level data from standardized tests covering all students in Peru who were in eighth grade in 2015, 2016, 2018, or 2019 and match it with administrative data on student nationality. To obtain a causal effect, I restrict the comparison to students in different classrooms - and therefore with different exposure to Venezuelan immigrants - but in the same school and year. I find negative effects of immigrant presence on the academic performance of natives, but this effect is remarkably similar to the effect of introducing new native students to classrooms. This constitutes suggestive evidence that Venezuelan students affect natives because of their status as new students, and not necessarily because of their immigrant status. Chapter 2 provides a novel link between the literature on immigrant peer effects and the effects of domestic student mobility.Chapter 3 explores the existence of differential grading by teachers in Peruvian high schools. I use two measures of student performance for Peruvian students and immigrants in eighth grade: (a) standardized test scores and (b) report card grades. The former is anonymously scored by the Ministry of Education, while the latter is graded by classroom teachers. I compare local and immigrant students with the same standardized test score and look at differences in the teacher-graded performance measure. I find evidence of teachers giving immigrant students different grades than native students with similar standardized test scores, but it is difficult to attribute these differences to teacher bias.