Bad Apples, Social Capital and Human Capital in El Salvador: Evidence from Salvadoran High School Students

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of classroom conflict and social capital on different measures of human capital accumulation in middle school and high school students from El Salvador. Using class-level measures of mutual enmity and friendship obtained through network analysis and exploiting exogenous variation in the proportion of students who have repeated the school year, I obtain consistent estimates of gendered and non-linear effects on different academic outcomes. The thesis’ main findings reveal that class conflict, mediated by mutual enemy relationships, impacts various educational outcomes differently for boys and girls, including enrollment likelihood in university and expected years of schooling. Additionally, lower-quality social capital accumulation at the classroom level is associated with improved performance in cognitive skills and increases educational continuation for girls, but reduces schooling expectations for certain students at the bottom of the human capital distribution. Gang activity appears to exacerbate these effects, particularly affecting girls and students with less potential educational benefit, while bullying is shown as a potential mechanism further elucidating gender differences in preferences for investments in social and human capital.