Davide Dottori (Bank of Italy)
Luca Brugnara, Francesca Modena and Giulia Martina Tanzi
This paper investigates the influence of peers parents in shaping high school students decisions to enroll in university, highlighting the joint role of their education level and occupation. Using a rich longitudinal dataset on Italian students, we track individuals from high school to university enrollment and exploit within-school and cross-cohort variation to identify peer effects. Our results show that peers' parental education positively impacts university enrollment and it does it more strongly when paired with the type of occupation. These findings hold across students' and parents' gender and are more pronounced in non-academic schools and among students whose parents do not hold a university degree, thus suggesting that peer observation is particularly relevant in contexts where the propensity to attend university is lower. The paper also finds that the peer effect is non-linear and strongest at intermediate levels of exposure, suggesting that a certain degree of diversity in the educational background of peers parents may maximize the overall effect.