Young Development Economists Webinar Series (YoDEV) – Elif Kubilay (University of Essex), 12th November 2020 at 2:30 p.m. (CET)

Elif Kubilay (University of Essex) on “Social Exclusion and Ethnic Segregation in Schools: The Role of Teacher’s Ethnic Prejudice”, jointly organised by the Department of Economics and Management of Università di Pavia, Università degli Studi di Milano – Bicocca e Centro Studi Luca d’Agliano. The webinar will be held on Tuesday, 12th November 2020 at 2:30 p.m. (CET) via Zoom. 

Abstract: Using uniquely detailed data on primary school children and their teachers, we show that teachers who hold prejudicial attitudes towards an ethnic group create socially and spatially segregated classrooms. We identify this relationship by exploiting a natural experiment where newly arrived refugee children are randomly assigned to teachers within schools. We elicit children’s social networks to construct multiple measures of social exclusion and ethnic segregation in classrooms. We find that teachers’ ethnic prejudice significantly lowers the prevalence of inter-ethnic social links in classrooms, increases homophilic ties among native children, and puts minority children at a higher risk of peer violence.