Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The influx of immigrants has shifted the ethnic composition of public schools in many states including North Carolina. Recent evidence from North Carolina suggests that a larger share of Limited English students is associated with a slight decline in performance solely for students at the top of the achievement distribution. The heterogeneous peer effects by achievement level lead us to explore in this paper whether the increased immigration has differential effects by gender and race. Utilizing fixed effect methods that allow us to address possible endogeneity with respect to the schools students attend, we find evidence of heterogeneous peer effects …