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.