Working Paper #2009-034
Student Network Centrality and Academic Performance: Evidence from United Nations University
In this paper we empirically studied the relationship between network
centrality and academic performance among a group of 47 PhD students
from UNU-MERIT institute. We conducted an independent email survey and
relied on social networks theory as well as standard econometric
procedures to analyse the data. We found a significant reversed U-shaped
relation between network centrality and students’ academic performance.
We controlled our results by several node’s characteristics such as age,
academic background, and research area. Additional evidence shows that
there is a negative impact of age on academic performance at PhD student
level. Contributions of this paper can refer to the input into studies
that aim to explore peereffect. Also it contributes to the
methodological approach by combining elements of network analysis and
econometric theories. This study demonstrates that when evaluating the
impact of network centrality on performance, there is no significant
difference between various network centrality measurements.
- Keywords
-
- Networks analysis
- Network centrality
- Peer-effect
- Academic performance UNU-MERIT Working Papers ISSN 1871-9872
- JEL codes
-
- D85
- I21
- I23
- L14
Cite this as
APA 7th ed.Zhang, Y., Rajabzadeh, I., & Lauterbach, R. (2009). Student Network Centrality and Academic Performance: Evidence from United Nations University (UNU-MERIT Working Paper No. 2009-034). UNU-MERIT. https://unu-merit.nl/publications/working-papers/abstract/?id=3783