American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
First-Generation Elite: The Role of School Social Networks
American Economic Review
(pp. 4369–4403)
Abstract
High school students from non-elite backgrounds are less likely to have peers with elite-educated parents than their elite counterparts. This difference in social capital is a key driver of the high intergenerational persistence in elite education. We identify a positive elite peer effect on enrollment in elite programs and labor market earnings, then disentangle underlying mechanisms. Exploiting a lottery in assessment, a causal mediation analysis shows the overall positive peer effect reflects a positive effect on application behavior (conditional on GPA). When considering income mobility, we find that further mixing between high school elite and non-elite students could improve mobility.Citation
Cattan, Sarah, Kjell G. Salvanes, and Emma Tominey. 2025. "First-Generation Elite: The Role of School Social Networks." American Economic Review 115 (12): 4369–4403. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20230582Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D31 Personal Income, Wealth, and Their Distributions
- I21 Analysis of Education
- I23 Higher Education; Research Institutions
- I24 Education and Inequality
- J31 Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
- J62 Job, Occupational, and Intergenerational Mobility; Promotion
- Z13 Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification