A Big Fish in a Small Pond: Ability Rank and Human Capital Investment
By Benjamin Elsner, Ingo E. Isphording. Journal of Labor Economics, 2017
171 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We study the impact of a student’s ordinal rank in a high school cohort on educational attainment several years later. To identify a causal effect, we compare multiple cohorts within the same school, exploiting idiosyncratic variation in cohort composition. We find that a student’s ordinal rank significantly affects educational outcomes later in life. Students with a higher rank are significantly more likely to finish high school and to attend college. Exploring potential channels, we find that students with a higher rank have higher expectations about their future career, as well as a higher perceived intelligence.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Education, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0b6172b9a887d18294c31a9960bb931678f173e7
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Citations in the corpus
- High-Performing Peers and Female STEM Choices in School (2020, methodology): “Recent papers document that ordinal rank within a school or classroomcan have significant effects on academic and labormarket outcomes (Elsner and Isphording 2017; Denning, Murphy, and Weinhardt 2018;Murphy andWeinhardt 2018).”