Did School Closures during the Covid-19 Alter the Relevance of Ability Peer Effects? Evidence from Italy

Peers have been shown to affect many important outcomes, including academic performance. For that reason, affirming the existence of peer effects is essential in terms of policy. The aim of the present study is two-fold. First, it is intended to identify the effect of a student’s relative position among peers on his/her own learning. Second, it aims to demonstrate how school closures during Covid-19 affected peer effects and subsequently the educational achievement of students by comparing pre- and post-pandemic cohorts. To find answer to the above two questions and to estimate the effects, I exploit INVALSI data collected in academic years 2014/2015 to 2021/2022 at grade 5 and 8 in Italy (including four cohorts). Italy is an interesting case because it was one of the first countries seriously impacted by Covid-19 pandemic. Starting on February 2020, Italian schools were closed for 15 weeks. This was one of Europe’s longest school closures in spring 2020. The findings indicate that having higher classroom rank at the end-of-elementary-school is associated with a gain at the end-of-secondary-school test scores for all four cohorts. Importantly, this gain is obviously smaller for the students in school year 2021-2022 since they experienced the covid-19 pandemic restrictions in terms of school closures for a longer duration. This is the first evidence on how the pandemic-induced school closures changed the structure of peer effects and thus the shape of the education production function.