Discussion paper

DP15933 Diversity in Schools: Immigrants and the Educational Performance of U.S. Born Students

We study the effect of exposure to immigrants on the educational outcomes of US-born students, using a unique dataset combining population-level birth and school records from Florida. This research question is complicated by substantial school selection of US-born students, especially among White and comparatively affluent students, in response to the presence of immigrant students in the school. We propose a new identification strategy to partial out the unobserved non-random selection into schools, and find that the presence of immigrant students has a positive effect on the academic achievement of US-born students, especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Moreover, the presence of immigrants does not affect negatively the performance of affluent US-born
students, who typically show a higher academic achievement compared to immigrant students. We provide suggestive evidence on potential channels.

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Citation

Figlio, D, P Giuliano, R Marchingiglio, U Ozek and P Sapienza (2021), ‘DP15933 Diversity in Schools: Immigrants and the Educational Performance of U.S. Born Students‘, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 15933. CEPR Press, Paris & London. https://cepr.org/publications/dp15933