Paola Giuliano (UCLA Anderson)

“Diversity in Schools: Immigrants and the Educational Performance of Natives”

Abstract: We study the effect of exposure to immigrant peers on the educational outcomes of native students, using a unique dataset combining birth records and population-level administrative data from the Florida Department of Education. We focus on the cumulative cohort-school-specific exposure to foreign born students throughout a native student’s educational career, and we identify our parameter of interest by comparing siblings’ performances in standardized test scores in mathematics and reading. Our identification strategy and robustness analysis allows us to partial out the unobserved non-random selection into schools. We find a positive and statistically significant association between the cumulative exposure to foreign born students and native students’ test scores. We study potential non –exclusive mechanisms that could drive the main result: our evidence suggests that immigrants behave better than natives and cause fewer disruption in daily activity, possibly improving the learning environment (Lazear, 2001).