Mixing kids in school leads to more mixed-race adult relationships

Mixing kids in school leads to more mixed-race adult relationships

IZA Newsroom
Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit (Institute for the Study of Labor)
Bonn, Germany
2016-11-24

Does the racial mix of students’ classmates affect their behavior later on in life? A new IZA Discussion Paper by Luca Paolo Merlino, Max Friedrich Steinhardt and Liam Wren-Lewis compares American students, contrasting those who happen to be in an age group with fewer blacks in their class compared to other classes in the school.

The study finds that white students with more black classmates are more likely to cohabit and have children with a black partner later on in life. The effect is driven by a change in racial attitudes: These students report less prejudice, and as adults they are less likely to think that race is an important factor within a relationship…

Read the entire article here.

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