Internal migrant children in Chinese classrooms: Do they influence students’ achievements?

Abstract

This paper analyzes whether internal migrant children have negative peer effects on students’ academic achievements and to explore the mechanisms of these effects, if present. We firstly divided the migrant students into different groups according to their migrant experience. We then examined peer effects of different groups of migrant children, and the effects in differently ranked schools were particularly explored. It is found that rural-urban migrant children had negative peer effects, particularly in low- and middle-ranked schools, while the urban-urban migrant children had no negative peer effects. Endogenous and correlated effects are found as the mechanism of these peer effects.