Identifying Peer Effects in Networks with Unobserved Effort and Isolated Students (opens in new tab)

Peer influence on effort devoted to some activity is often studied when effort is unobserved, and the researcher instead observes an outcome that combines effort with other shocks. For instance, in education, achievement measures such as GPA reflect both effort and idiosyncratic GPA shocks. We propose an alternative approach that circumvents this approximation. Our framework distinguishes unobserved shocks to GPA that do not affect effort fr...