The hidden legacy of peer effects: immigrant schoolmates and long-term educational outcomes in Italy

With the rise in immigrant concentration in all European countries, it becomes central to understand the implications of increased heterogeneity in the field of education, among others. Contemporaneous peer effects arising from immigrant exposure have been studied accurately in the last decades, but there is still a gap with respect to whether these effects last over time. We exploit data from INVALSI to retrieve information over one cohort of student in Italy from 5th to 13th grade and try to estimate the causal effect of immigrant concentration in 5th grade on test scores in 5th, 8th, and 13th grades. To address non-random sorting of students across schools and classrooms, we adopt fixed effects at province level and measure the school-level share of immigrants. When controlling for important individual characteristics and for the socio-economic background of children, we find evidence of persistent negative effects arising from early exposure to immigrant peers up that last up to the end of upper secondary education.