Disruptive school peers and student outcomes

• We investigate how peer achievement is affected by disruptive classmates.
• We exploit that some children move between schools and thus generate variation in peer composition.
• We identify three groups of potentially disruptive children: children with divorced parents, children with parents convicted of crime, and children with a psychiatric diagnosis.
• We find that adding potentially disruptive children lowers achievement by about 2% of a standard deviation.

This paper estimates how peers’ achievement gains are affected by the presence of potentially disruptive and emotionally sensitive children in the school-cohort. We exploit that some children move between schools and thus generate variation in peer composition in the receiving school-cohort. We identify three groups of potentially disruptive and emotionally sensitive children from detailed Danish register data: children with divorced parents, children with parents convicted of crime, and children with a psychiatric diagnosis. We find that adding potentially disruptive children lowers the academic achievement of peers by about 1.7–2.3% of a standard deviation.