Rodrigo Perez Silva (p), Mark Partridge, William Foster

When analyzing knowledge production, the evidence suggests that within the U.S., foreign-born researchers exhibit more productivity than their domestic counterparts. Previous literature indicates that productivity differences can be explained by higher academic ability and the selection of more research-oriented fields of study among foreign-born. In this paper we use individual data from the restricted access version of the Survey of Doctoral Recipients between 1995 and 2003 to extend this notion and compare knowledge production, in terms of papers presented, articles published, patent applications, and patents granted, of foreign-born and domestic PhD recipients. Our results strongly support the notion that foreign-born researchers, and especially naturalized U.S. citizens, outperform their domestic counterparts in three of our four measures of knowledge production: journal articles, patent applications, and patents granted. We show that while aspects associated with academic training, quality of the school, occupation mismatch, and fields of study, among others, play a role in productivity differentials, they only account for a small proportion of the variability. Unobservable aspects associated with non-academic ability of foreign-born and a better match between the student and the PhD program may explain the results.

Annie Tubadji (p), Roberto Patuelli (p), Enrico Santarelli

Preceding research on high-school students finds that some of the main determining factors for entrepreneurial orientation are their local neighbourhood and school peers. In the current paper, following leading research regarding peer group’s influence on students behaviour, we delve deeper into peer group effects. First, we examine class composition and the intensity of the student’s relationship with her classmates. Next, we compare these class-school group peer effects with the neighbourhood peer effects. We address two working hypotheses: (i) that individual entrepreneurial orientation is affected by group characteristics, such as gender composition and pro-entrepreneurial environment, differently by gender and by the origin of the peers (either in school or the neighbourhood); (ii) that the share of personal friends from the group (weighted for group size) and the intensity of the relationship with them moderate the effect from group characteristics on the students’ individual entrepreneurial orientation. First, we consider that our data is clustered in schools and classes. Thus, some main assumptions for linear models are challenged, as we conduct both a nested model estimation (accounting for the nested structure of the data similarly to a fixed effect approach), and a hierarchical (multilevel) model estimation (allowing us to explain stochastically the variation per class and school by the measured group characteristics). In the latter case, the characteristics to explain at the class level will be gender composition, group entrepreneurial culture and the intensity of the relationship with classmates, while, at the school level, we will correct for school type and type of neighbourhood where the school is located. Second, the same type of analysis can be conducted when the clustering of students is considered across neighbourhoods, instead of across classes and schools. The gender composition and entrepreneurial orientation of students from the same neighbourhood will be considered to explain the one of individual students.

Julia Sonnenburg (p), Carolin Fritzsche

The impact of housing conditions on educational achievements of children is a controversial subject in scholarly research. At the same time, the political debate seems to be rather certain about the positive influence of housing conditions and therefore usually aims at providing financial support for young families who want to buy a house. Exploiting different datasets for the unique setting of Germany, this paper aims to show that not housing conditions but (correlated) abilities by parents have a substantial influence on the educational attainments of children.
For the empirical investigation of the relationship between homeownership and the educational achievement of children, several logistic regressions are run. The PAIRFAM and the NEPS data provide a powerful resource for assessing the effects of housing conditions, children’s characteristics, neighborhood relations and parental characteristics and abilities in Germany. We include information on the parents accumulated by interviews and tests that capture a variety of skills and their relationship situation. The results of our study indicate that it is not the housing condition per se that can positively influence children as it has been noted in previous studies. There are rather skills and abilities of the parents that are correlated with better housing conditions which have a positive impact on children. This paper is most closely related to Barker and Miller (2009) as we also extend previous studies by using different data. What sets us apart is, first, our unique dataset. To our knowledge, detailed information on the parents’ abilities and skills has not been available in previous econometric analysis. Second, our analysis focuses on the special case of Germany. The German educational system can be considered as rather independent of the financial resources of the parents and more transparent with many possibilities to achieve higher education levels. Furthermore, the German housing market is characterized by more conservative bank lending practices than in other countries leading to lower homeownership rates. If there would be an effect of homeownership on educational achievement, it should especially prevail in the German setting.