Jan Bietenbeck

Long-term impacts of low-achieving childhood peers

In a recent paper, forthcoming in the Journal of the European Economic Association, Jan Bietenbeck examines how low-achieving students in kindergarten affect the educational performance of their classmates. Exposure to such low achievers initially decreases regular students’ math scores but increases their probability to graduate from high school and to take a college entrance exam around the age of 18. This divergence in short- and long-term impacts is likely due to the higher accumulation of non-cognitive skills by students exposed to low achievers, and it suggests that mixing children of different abilities in primary school can have important long-term benefits.

Mr Bietenbeck’s research is in the areas of economics of education and health economics. While at CESifo, he plans to continue his work on the influence of classmates on educational performance. In particular, he will work on a project which considers the importance of teachers in moderating such peer influences.

Jan Bietenbeck is Assistant Professor of Economics at Lund University in Sweden. Before coming to Lund, he completed his PhD at CEMFI in Madrid under the supervision of David Dorn. For his dissertation, he won the Prize for the Best Dissertation in the Economics of Education 2015/16, which is awarded biannually by the Committee for the Economics of Education of the German Economic Association. Mr Bietenbeck is a Research Fellow at DIW Berlin and at IZA Bonn.