A Big Fish in a Small Pond: Ability Rank and Human Capital Investment

Abstract

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.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 176 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.