Abstract
This paper investigates whether parental occupations of middle school classmates causally influence high school track choice—a critical margin for intergenerational mobility. Using administrative data from Italy, I compare students whose parents hold the same occupation and exploit within-school, within-cohort variation in classroom composition arising from quasi-random class assignment. A one-standard-deviation increase in exposure to classmates with high prestige parental occupations raises academic track enrollment by approximately 2 percentage points, while equivalent exposure to classmates with low prestige parental occupations reduces it by a smaller magnitude. I then disentangle this effect from the role of classmates' academic achievement by instrumenting the latter using partially overlapping groups of classmates. The estimated effect of classmates' parental occupations persists, and I find evidence that classmates’ achievement does not mediate it, consistent with non-academic channels such as information transmission, aspiration formation, and social-status considerations. These findings suggest that classroom composition policies can shape educational sorting beyond their effects on student achievement.
Country of study
Italy