Testing peer effects among college students: evidence from an unusual admission policy change in China

This paper studies a natural experiment due to an unusual change in the college admission policy at a Chinese university, which brought a large number of low-score students into several academic departments in the university. Exploiting large variations in peer characteristics and strong interactions among peer groups, the analysis finds that specially admitted low-score students have substantially reduced the performance of regular students on English tests. This detrimental effect from specially admitted students is concentrated among regular students whose English ability was below average.