Following your lead: Migration networks and immigrants' education decisions.

• This paper estimates the effect of immigrant networks on education of school-age Salvadoran immigrants in the United States. • Salvadoran immigrants exposed to a larger network complete fewer years of schooling after arriving to the United States. • Immigrants may face a distorted trade-off between studying and working when exposed to large immigrant networks. • Young immigrants may decide to not go to school if they are exposed to a network that offers them low-skill jobs. This paper estimates the effect of immigrant networks on the education of school-age Salvadoran immigrants in the United States. I construct an instrument for the network size in the U.S. using previous settlement patterns and municipality-level push factors in El Salvador such as crime, agricultural land use, and economic development. I find that Salvadoran immigrants lose half a year of education when their network size exogenously increases by 1 standard deviation (4.7% decrease). Causal links between the education decisions of immigrants and their network may partly explain the low level of education attained by new young immigrants. Immigrants with more education may assimilate better into their host countries and contribute to their economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]