Journal of Human Resources

Bullying is a widespread social phenomenon that is thought to have detrimental effects on life outcomes. This paper investigates the link between bullying and later school performance. We rely on rich survey and register-based data for children born in a region of Denmark during 1990–92, which allows us to carefully consider possible confounders including psychological factors. We implement an IV strategy inspired by Carrell and Hoekstra (2010) where we instrument victim status with the proportion of peers from troubled homes in one’s classroom. We show that bullied children suffer in terms of GPA and effects tend to increase with severity.