Heterogeneous Peer Effects and Rank Concerns: Theory and Evidence
By Michela Tincani. Social Science Research Network, 2017
64 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Using a theoretical model where students care about achievement rank, I study effort choices in the classroom and show that rank concerns generate peer effects. The model’s key empirical prediction is that the effect on own achievement of increasing the dispersion in peer cost of effort is heterogeneous, depending on a student’s own cost of effort. To test this, I construct a longitudinal multi-cohort dataset of students, with data on the geographic propagation of building damages from the Chilean 2010 earthquake. I find that higher dispersion in home damages among one’s classmates led, on average, to lower own Mathematics and Spanish test scores. To be able to test the theory, I develop a novel nonlinear difference-in-differences model that estimates effect heterogeneity and that relates observed damages to unobserved cost of effort. I find that some students at the tails of the predicted cost of effort distribution benefit from higher dispersion in peer cost of effort, as predicted by the theoretical model. This finding suggests that observed peer effects on test scores are, at least partly, governed by rank concerns.
Subfields: Education
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/05c6ea2b56738d8dad5a899a9c9ca1c0d6d50cc5
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Citations in the corpus
- Ability Peer Effects in University: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment (2016, background): “…standard deviation is for example implied by social cognitive learning theory which argues that achievement may benefit from the presence of similar classmates (Bandura, 1986; Schunk, 1991), but can also be rationalized by a model where students care about their rank in the class (Tincani, 2014).”
- Top of the Class: The Importance of Ordinal Rank (2018, background): “These imbalances could instead be caused by different types of students having different rank concerns during primary school as in Tincani (2015) for example.”