Neighborhood effect and school performance: The case of students from public schools in the city of Recife

Abstract This study aims to investigate the influence of the neighborhood over the students' performance in the public school system of Recife, Brazil. Specifically, we investigate empirically the existence of a relation among the students’ performance and the characteristics of their neighborhoods, and the mechanisms by which this influence occurs. For that, we use the data set of the Fundaj (2013) to build, in a pioneer way in Brazil, the neighborhood variables of the students regarding small geographic scales. Our econometric results indicate that the students that live in privileged neighborhoods tend to show higher scores than the others. The peer composition analysis suggests that only the proportion of the grade repetition influences the students' math grades.