Gender peer effects in doctoral education: Evidence from Sweden*

Abstract

By understanding how we are affected by the other members of groups, interactive forums can be more optimally organised, giving rise to welfare increases. This thesis addresses two key research questions: (1) Does the gender composition of a doctoral student’s cohort affect said student’s academic performance and (2) if gender composition has an effect, does this effect differ between men and women? To address these questions, I use unique individual registry data on all individuals who been enrolled in a Swedish doctoral education from 1971 to 2010. I exploit the within program across cohorts variation in gender composition to obtain exogeneity. The results suggest a negative impact on male academic performance of a greater share of females in the cohort, while the results indicate that there is no overall effect on female performance. However, when examining the effect in different research fields separately, I find a statistically significant positive effect on female performance from a higher share of females within Engineering Sciences.