Abstract
This thesis contains three studies focusing on the role of peer effect and student teacher familiarity in children’s human capital development. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the studies.Chapter 2 reports a study in which examines how disruptive peers affect student bullying behaviour in a shared classroom environment. To estimate the peer effects, I use the data featuring a quasi-experimental setting which effectively addresses the key challenges in identifying peer effects: reflection problem, common shocks, and selection issue. The estimates suggest that being exposed to a higher share of disruptive peers increases student bullying behaviour.
Building on Chapter 2, Chapter 3 utilizes the same quasi-experimental setting to provide the first estimates of the peer effects of birth order on students’ cognitive and noncognitive development. Descriptive evidence shows that later-born children underperform relative to first-borns and only children, suggesting the potential for negative peer spillovers. Given this potential, I employ the proportion of later-born peers as the measure of peer birth order. The estimation results indicate that exposure to a higher share of later-born peers negatively affects only-child students’ academic achievement, mental stress, and social acclimation.
Acknowledging the importance of teacher-student familiarity, Chapter 4 offers the first nationally representative evidence on the effects of repeat student-teacher matches within the Chinese context. Using a student-by-subject panel and estimating a set of fixed-effects models, I find that student-teacher rematches have robust positive effects on academic achievement.
Chapter 5 summarizes the findings of this dissertation and concludes.
| Date of Award | 19 Jul 2026 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Yang Li (Supervisor), Molin Li (Supervisor) & Zhenjiang Lin (Supervisor) |
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