Peer effects on academic cheating among high school students in Taiwan

Although academic cheating has been found to be a common phenomenon in high schools, few studies investigate how peers influence individual cheating behavior among high school students. In this paper, we estimate the cross-gender and intra-gender interaction effects on academic cheating among high school students in Taiwan. We detect the evidence of male-male and female-female peer interactions on academic cheating. The female-female interaction effect is stronger than the male-male interaction effect. These results imply girls are more influenced by female peers on academic cheating. The cross-gender interactions (male to female, female to male interactions) are not significant. Whereas, we find that all of the social interaction coefficients become insignificant when this model allows for school-specific fixed effects.