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Peer Death Exposure & High School Outcomes
Joshua Goodman, Associate Professor of Education and Economics, Boston University
Abstract: Researchers are increasingly interested in the role of trauma and loss in children’s lives. Using the universe of Massachusetts public school students, we document the death rates of school-aged children and explore the impact of student deaths on their peers’ high school outcomes. Annual death rates are steady through grades 1-8 but rise rapidly in high school, driven largely by boys and most starkly by Black boys. In any given year, 5 percent of high school students have a grademate die. School-grade fixed effects models suggest that experiencing a grademate’s death lowers test scores, attendance, GPA, and high school graduation rates. The effects are stronger the earlier in high school students experience a peer's death and are stronger for low income, Black and Hispanic students. Our results suggest that spillover effects from peer deaths extend beyond the relatively narrow focus of recent literature on school shootings.
Joshua Goodman is an associate professor of education and economics at Boston University, where he works as an applied microeconomist on labor economics and education policy. He is also affiliated faculty with the Wheelock Educational Policy Center. He serves as co-editor of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (JPAM) and is a research fellow of NBER and CESifo. Prior to joining BU, Dr. Goodman was associate professor of economics at Brandeis University and associate professor of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He has a BA in physics from Harvard, an MPhil in education from Cambridge University, and a PhD in economics from Columbia. Prior to starting his PhD, he was a public high school math teacher in Watertown, Massachusetts.
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