Silvia Mendolia - The Causal Effects of School Bullying Victimisation as an Adolescent on Later Life Outcomes

Title: The Causal Effects of School Bullying Victimisation as an Adolescent on Later Life Outcomes

Abstract: We use a large and rich cohort of recent English adolescents to analyse the long-term effects of having been bullied in junior high school. The data contains self-reports of five types of bullying behaviour, including the intensity of bullying, for three waves of the data covering the period up to the minimum school leaving age.  Using a variety of estimation strategies - least squares, matching, inverse probability weighting, and IV – we analyse a number of short and long term, including educational achievement, and earnings and mental ill health at age 25. We test for selection on unobservables and importantly the data contains independent cross-reports of each bullying type from the main parent which, together with other ideas, we exploit to resolve endogeneity arising from unobservables and from measurement error in the self-reports. Since we have many bullying treatments we also conduct factor analysis to exploit this richness of the data in a practical way.  The pattern of results strongly suggests there are important long run effects on victims – stronger than correlation analysis would otherwise suggest. In particular, we find that both type of bullying and its intensity matters.

Presenter: Silvia Mendolia, University of Wollongong

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