Brown Bag Seminar: Peer Backgrounds Matter: Classmates' Parents and High School Track Choice

This paper investigates whether parental occupations of middle school classmates causally influence high school track choice—a critical margin for intergenerational mobility. Using administrative data from Italy, I compare students whose parents hold the same occupation and exploit within-school, within-cohort variation in classroom composition arising from quasi-random class assignment. A one-standard-deviation increase in exposure to classmates with high prestige parental occupations raises academic track enrollment by approximately 2 percentage points, while equivalent exposure to classmates with low prestige parental occupations reduces it by a smaller magnitude. I then disentangle this effect from the role of classmates' academic achievement by instrumenting the latter using partially overlapping groups of classmates. The estimated effect of classmates' parental occupations persists, and I find evidence that classmates’ achievement does not mediate it, consistent with non-academic channels such as information transmission, aspiration formation, and social-status considerations. These findings suggest that classroom composition policies can shape educational sorting beyond their effects on student achievement.