同伴社会资本与学业成就--基于随机分配自然实验的案例分析

Peer Social Capital and Academic Achievement: Evidence from a Randomly Assigned Natural Experiment

本文超越了既有研究的家庭社会资本视角,考察了同伴社会资本对青少年学业成就的影响。以中国某高校官方数据为例,在充分考虑内生性等问题的基础上,本文发现同伴的学业能力显著影响高校学生的人力资本积累。与国外相关发现不同的是:第一,同伴社会资本的影响机制是间接的,而非直接。同伴网络通过影响个体的价值观和行为来影响最终学业产出。第二,随着时间的推移,同伴社会资本的影响有增强的趋势。影响变强来源于同自身阶层背景相似的同伴,而背景相异的同伴影响则维持稳定。另外,对于不同阶层背景的学生而言,同伴社会资本的影响并无显著差异。

This paper explores the effect of peer social capital on adolescents' academic performance. It uses the official dataset from a university in China's Mainland,takes the issue of endogeneity into account,and finds that the academic ability of peers has indeed influenced the accumulation of human capital for university students. This finding stands contrast to what has been found in other research contexts. First,it is through an indirect rather than a direct way that peer social capital affects adolescents' academic performance, as the peer networks affect university students' performance by having an influence on their academic attitudes and behaviors. Second,as time passes by,the effect of peer social capital on university students' academic performance gets stronger,rather than attenuates. Such an increase can be attributed to the role played by peers from roughly the same social class background,whereas those coming from quite different social background exert a steady impact on university students' academic performance. Moreover,there is no solid evident indicating that peer social capital has different impact on university students with different social class backgrounds.