Видеозапись семинара "Endogenous Shocks in Social Networks: Effects of Students' Exam Retakes on their Friends' Future Performance"

 

Speaker:   

Maria Marchenko - PhD Student, Center for Doctoral Studies in Economics, Graduate School of Economic and Social Sciences, University of Mannheim  

Exam retakes, as other types of shocks or the treatment happening to one of the players in the network influence not only their future performance but affect all their network connections. Thus, it is crucial to understand the behavior of the whole network in response to the retake. It is, however, highly endogenous. The logic used in peer effect literature is adopted to develop the dynamic model accounting for the endogeneity of the shock. The model allows predicting the endogenous part of the friends' retake and use the unexpected component to estimate the effect of pure shock on the changes in one's average grade. The identification conditions for the effect are derived and the consistent estimation procedure is proposed. It is applied to the dynamic network data on the students in HSE, Nizhniy Novgorod. The results suggest that on average the retake of the friend may have a negative effect on future performance, however, this effect has a different magnitude for students with and without own retake, as well as for students of different departments.

Working paper: download (PDF, 846 Кб)