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Jeonghyeok Kim
High-achieving minority students have fewer friends than their majority counterparts. Exploring patterns of friendship formation in the Add Health data, we find strong racial homophily in friendship formations as well as strong achievement homophily within race. However, we find that achievement matters less in cross-racial friendships. As a result, high-achieving Black students lose Black friends as they move away from the mean achievement of their group, but do not gain high-achieving White friends in offsetting fashion. We find that high-achieving Black students have 0.9 fewer friends, mainly attributable to the fact that they are exposed to fewer high-achieving peers within their own race. We find that this could account for as much as 5 to 9 percent of the racial wage gap observed among high achievers.
Each year, over a thousand public schools in the US close due to declining enrollments and chronic low performance, displacing hundreds of thousands of students. Using Texas administrative data and empirical strategies that use within-student across-time and within-school across-cohort variation, I explore the impact of school closures on students' educational and labor market outcomes. The findings indicate that experiencing school closures results in disruptions in both test scores and behavior. While the drop in test scores is recovered within three years, behavioral issues persist. This study further finds decreases in post-secondary education attainment, employment, and earnings at ages 25–27. These impacts are particularly pronounced among students in secondary education, Hispanic students, and those from originally low-performing schools and economically disadvantaged families.