Time：Dec. 1（Wed）10:00-11:30am

Tenct Meeting for PKU students

Speaker：Jun Hyung Kim  (暨南大学)

Topic：Effects of Childhood Peers on Personality Skills

Despite extensive literature on peer effects, the role of peers on personality skill development remains poorly understood. We fill this gap by investigating the effects of having disadvantaged primary school peers, generated by random classroom assignment and parental migration for employment. We find that disadvantaged peers significantly lower conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability, and social skill. The implied effects of the 10--15 percentage point change in the classroom proportion of disadvantaged peers are comparable to the effects of popular early childhood interventions. Furthermore, we find suggestive evidence that these effects are driven by the peers' personality skills.

Jun Hyung Kim is an Assistant Professor at Jinan University’s Institute for Economic and Social Research. He received his PhD in 2019 from the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago and BA from UC Berkeley in 2009.

His research is in labor economics, particular in the areas of human capital, family, health, and child development. He also collaborates across disciplines and has worked with developmental psychologists and sociologists in the past. His work has been published in Labour Economics, Social Science & Medicine, and Journal of Marketing Research.