According to the Cyberbullying Research Center, thousands of students across the country skip school each day to avoid being bullied. Although bullying continues to concern society, the literature has relatively few quality studies that examine the consequences of bullying. This project seeks to determine the effect repeated bullying has on an individual’s academic achievement. However, it is difficult to determine whether a student is bullied because of academic issues that the student is already experiencing or whether the bullying causes these issues. To account for this concern, a quasi- experimental design using internal instruments was employed along with a siblings fixed effect. The internal instruments approach uses heteroskedasticity in the first stage to create identification while the siblings fixed effect controls for anything that is family specific that does not vary over time. By controlling for these factors, the research found that bullying has no significant effect on academic achievement. This study suggests that bullying might be an effect of low academic achievement, but not a cause.
