A Saúde dos Amigos de Sala de Aula Interfere no Desempenho Escolar do Aluno?

Abstract

This paper evaluates the influence of classmate’s health on individual academic achievement of six graders students from public schools in the city of Recife/Pernambuco. The empirical estimations use a new educational dataset originated from a Brazilian public institution (Fundação Joaquim Nabuco 2013), which provides crucial information for the identification strategies. Such strategies exploit: (i) the architecture of friendship networks in the classrooms, (ii) a longitudinal evaluation of school achievement in two math tests applied at the beginning and end of school year, (iii) the control of network fixed effects and (iii) spatial models estimation using friendship network matrix within classroom. The results show students perform better when their classmates’ friends exhibit a good health status. An increase of one standard deviation (sd) in the ratio of healthy peers improves by 9% sds the student’s grade.

Keywords:
Health; School achievement; Friendship network; Peer effects