Working Papers:
Does the Closeness of Peers Matter? An Investigation Using Online Training Platform Data and Survey Data, with Haizheng Li, 2024, Job Market Paper
Abstract: We study peer effects in online training participation using unique data from a large-scale online teacher training program. The platform data allow us to observe the accurate duration of attendance for every individual-lecture pair, overcoming the challenges in estimating peer effects. The sample includes 138,032 observations from 8,627 trainees in 16 lectures. We categorize peers into global peers, local peers, and close peers based on their relationship. With controlling for unobserved heterogeneity by individual and lecture fixed effects, we find positive effects of close and local peer appearance on one joining a lecture and staying longer. However, global peers generate a negative but economically insignificant impact. The results show that close and local peers generate complement effects, but global peers generate substitution effects. In our context, the substitution effects may result from the possibility that absence or early leave may not be noticed to affect reputation. In contrast, the complementary effects occur if the pressure from peers makes one follow group actions to attend and stay longer in a lecture. Overall, peer effects differ by group and increase with the relationship closeness. Using the survey data, we investigate the mechanisms of the peer influences and find that social interactions facilitate online peer effects. Peer pressure and reputation concerns also help explain our findings. Our results shed new light on how peer effects can be utilized to improve the effectiveness of online learning.
Peer Effects with Sample Selection, with Haizheng Li, Zhongjian Lin, and Xun Tang, 2024, Under Review
Abstract: We study peer effects in social interaction models where individual participation in groups is endogenous. By exploiting instruments in participation choices, we estimate the peer and contextual effects using both individual and group-level correction terms. We apply our method to study peer effects in an online training program in China, and document significant peer effects and selection bias in the duration of lecture attendance among the trainees. Our estimates suggest that ignoring sample selection would over-estimate the peer effects.
Peer Effects on Working Adults’ On-the-job Learning: Experimental Evidence from An Online Teacher Training Program, with Lanfang Deng and Yiting Xu, 2024, Under Review
Abstract: We study how revealing peers’ past learning behaviors in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) affects individuals’ subsequent online job training attendance and performance in a large online teacher training program. We use a 2×2 between-subject experiment design where participants receive text messages varying 1) whether participants are informed about their peers’ average attendance rate only or additionally about their peers’ maximum attendance duration and 2) whether the referent peers are tenured or non-tenured. We find significant treatment effects on the participants’ attendance duration, mainly driven by knowing non-tenured peers’ pre-treatment attendance duration rather than their attendance rate. More importantly, we utilize the unique weak competitive relationship between tenured and non-tenured teachers in the Chinese education system to largely exclude the competitiveness channel of peer effects and empirically verify the social conformity channel. Additionally, teaching loads, school types, and familiarity with work location also impact the responsiveness to peers’ nudge information. Disentangling such social conformity sources of peer effects will have essential practical implications in a low competitive and sparsely interactive environment.
Publications:
Classmates and Friends Matter! Peer Effects and Cognitive Ability Formation, China Economic Review, 2023, 79: 101910
Uncertain Risk Aversion, with Jian Zhou, Yuanyuan Liu, Xiaoxia Zhang, and Di Wang, Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, 2017, 28(3): 615-624.
Model of Valuation for Supply Chain Finance based on Focal Company, with Jian Zhou and Ke Wang, Journal of Commercial Economics (Chinese Journal), 2015(27): 77-80.
Works in Progress:
Randomizing or Sorting? Class Assignment and Cognitive Ability
Provincial Test-based Education Quality Index of China