This paper considers an unavoidable feature of the school environment – what are the long run effects of a student’s ordinal rank in elementary school? Using administrative data from all public school students in Texas, we show that students with a higher third grade academic rank, conditional on ability and classroom fixed effects, have higher subsequent test scores, are more likely to take AP classes, to graduate high school, and to enroll in college, and ultimately have higher earnings 19 years later. The paper concludes by exploring the tradeoff between higher quality schools and higher rank in the presence of these rank-based peer effects.
Jeffrey T. Denning, Richard Murphy, and Felix Weinhardt,
"Class Rank and Long-Run Outcomes"
(2019).
EdWorkingPapers.com Archive.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:956632/
The Annenberg Institute at Brown University has developed this national working paper series to provide public access to high-quality papers from multiple disciplines on a wide variety of topics related to education. EdWorkingPapers focuses particularly on research with strong implications …
