IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/econjl/v133y2023i649p281-322..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Long-Run Effects of Peers on Mental Health

Author

Listed:
  • Lukas Kiessling
  • Jonathan Norris

Abstract

This paper studies how peers in school affect students’ mental health. Guided by a theoretical framework, we find that increasing students’ relative ranks in their cohorts by one standard deviation improves their mental health by 6% of a standard deviation conditional on own ability. These effects are more pronounced for low-ability students, persistent for at least 14 years and carry over to economic long-run outcomes. Moreover, we document a pronounced asymmetry: Students who receive negative rather than positive shocks react more strongly. Our findings therefore provide evidence on how the school environment can have long-lasting consequences for individuals’ well-being.

Suggested Citation

  • Lukas Kiessling & Jonathan Norris, 2023. "The Long-Run Effects of Peers on Mental Health," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 133(649), pages 281-322.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:econjl:v:133:y:2023:i:649:p:281-322.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ej/ueac039
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Adamopoulou, Effrosyni & Kaya, Ezgi, 2024. "Beautiful inside and out: Peer characteristics and academic performance," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 217(C), pages 507-532.
    2. Liwen Chen & Bobby W. Chung & Guanghua Wang, 2023. "Stay-at-Home Peer Mothers and Gender Norms: Short-run Effects on Educational Outcomes," Working Papers 2023-03, University of South Florida, Department of Economics.
    3. Stenberg, Anders & Tudor, Simona, 2023. "Field of Study and Mental Health in Adulthood," IZA Discussion Papers 16701, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    4. Adamopoulou, Effrosyni & Cao, Yaming & Kaya, Ezgi, 2024. "Gritty Peers," IZA Discussion Papers 17446, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    5. Bertoni, M.; & Marin-Lopez, B.A.; & Sanz-de-Galdeano, A.;, 2023. "Subjective Gender-Based Patterns in ADHD Diagnosis," Health, Econometrics and Data Group (HEDG) Working Papers 23/17, HEDG, c/o Department of Economics, University of York.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:econjl:v:133:y:2023:i:649:p:281-322.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press or the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/resssea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.