Inter-Ethnic Friendship and Hostility in Hungarian Schools: The Role of Academic Achievement and Exposure

This talk examines interethnic (Roma / non-Roma) friendships and refusals among students in Hungarian primary schools. The analysis draws on a recent (2010) survey with data on friends, ethnicity, family background and outcomes. The dataset contains information on 3200 8th-grade students from 88 schools in 74 of the larger municipalities in Hungary. The municipalities in the sample are the largest Hungarian cities and towns with a sizable Roma minority (except for Budapest). The selected schools have Roma representation between 10 and 90 percent. Each student completed an in-class questionnaire about friends, grades and family background. The friendship questions were comparable to those in the AddHealth survey from the US. The individual survey information was linked to student administrative records containing test scores and additional information on grades and family background.

Gábor Kertesi is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Economics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (IE/HAS) in Budapest. He has had the appointment to IE/HAS since 1985. He received his MA from the University of Chicago and his PhD from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (in economics). His research interests include labour, education and health economics, social inequalities and applied econometrics.