Sibling spillover effects in school achievement

This paper provides empirical evidence on direct sibling spillover effects in school achievement using administrative data on 220 thousand siblings in England. We extend previous strategies to identify peer effects by exploiting the variation in school test scores across three subjects observed at ages 11 and 16 as well as variation in peer quality between siblings. We find a statistically significant positive spillover effect from the older to the younger sibling but not vice versa. Spillover effects from high achieving older siblings are larger than from low achieving ones, but this relationship is weaker for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.