Does the Peer Group Matter? Assessing Frog Pond Effects in Transition to Secondary Schooling

Abstract

Peers are considered important for adolescents’ educational achievement and attainment, though little conclusive evidence demonstrate peer comparison effects. Using school and year fixed-effects models to account for peer group selection and comprehensive Danish administrative data on more than 260,000 students, across six cohorts, this study provides evidence of the so-called frog pond effect on the choice of secondary education among adolescents in Denmark. The frog pond effect is based upon a social comparison mechanism with heterogeneous effects. Through peer achievement, the author investigates the heterogeneous effects and show that peer achievement has different effects for low- and high-achieving students on choice of secondary education. The results shows that low-achieving students benefit from having high-achieving peers, while high-achieving students are negatively affected by their high-achieving peers, although only to a small extent. These findings lend support to the frog pond effect for high-achieving students.