Duration matters: peer effects on academic achievement with random assignment in the Chinese context

Abstract This paper goes beyond the most popular perspective of family social capital among existing research and examines the effect of peer social capital on adolescent academic achievement. Using the official data from a Chinese university and taking into account the endogeneity problems, this paper finds that peer academic performance has a significant effect on human capital accumulation among university students. We have different findings, however, from research abroad. First, peer social capital has an indirect rather than a direct effect. Second, the influence of initial randomly assigned peers tends to increase over time. However, this increase of influence is only present among peers from similar social class backgrounds. Among peers from different backgrounds, the influence remains almost unchanged. In addition to this, the influence of peer social capital is not significantly different among students from different social class backgrounds.