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This article establishes a new fact about educational production: ordinal academic rank during primary school has lasting impacts on secondary school achievement that are independent of underlying ability. Using data on the universe of English school students, we exploit naturally occurring differences in achievement distributions across primary school classes to estimate the impact of class rank. We find large effects on test scores, confidence, and subject choice during secondary school, even though these students have a new set of peers and teachers who are unaware of the students’ prior ranking in primary school. The effects are especially pronounced for boys, contributing to an observed gender gap in the number of Maths courses chosen at the end of secondary school. Using a basic model of student effort allocation across subjects, we distinguish between learning and non-cognitive skills mechanisms, finding support for the latter.

In this paper, we study ability peer effects in secondary schools in England and identify which segments of the peer ability distribution drive the impact of peer quality on students achievements. To do so, we use census data for four cohorts of pupils taking their age-14 national tests, and measure students ability by their prior achievements at age-11. We employ a new identification strategy based on within-pupil regressions that exploit variation in achievements across the three compulsory subjects (English, Mathematics and Science) tested both at age-14 and age-11. We find significant and sizeable negative peer effects arising from bad peers at the very bottom of the ability distribution, but little evidence that average peer quality and very good peers significantly affect pupils academic achievements. However, these results mask some significant heterogeneity along the gender dimension, with girls significantly benefiting from the presence of very academically bright peers, and boys marginally losing out. In this paper we study ability peer effects in educational outcomes between schoolmates in secondary schools in England. Our aims are both to investigate the size of ability peer effects on the outcomes of secondary school students and to explore which segments of the ability distribution of peers drive the impact of peer quality on pupils" achievements. In particular, we study whether the extreme tails of the ability distribution of peers -namely the exceptionally low-and highachievers -as opposed to the average peer quality drive any significant ability peer effect on the outcomes of other students.To do so, we use data for all secondary schools in England for four cohorts of age-14 ( We link this information to data on pupils" prior achievement at age-11, when they took their end-of-primary education national tests, which we exploit to obtain pre-determined measures of peer ability in secondary schools. In particular, we construct measures of average peer quality based on pupils" age-11 achievements, as well as proxies for the very high-and very low-achievers, obtained by identifying pupils who are in the highest or lowest 5% of the (cohort-specific) national distribution of cognitive achievement at age-11. The way in which we measure peer ability is a major improvement over previous studies. The majority of previous empirical evidence on ability peer effects in schools comes from studies that examine the effect of average background characteristics, such as parental schooling, race and ethnicity on students" outcomes (e.g.

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Top of the Class: The Importance of Ordinal Rank Abstract This paper examines the long-run impact of ordinal rank during primary school on productivity using comprehensive English administrative data. Identification is obtained from variation in test score distributions across cohorts and subjects, such that the same score relative to the class mean can have different ranks. Conditional on cardinal measures of achievement, being ranked highly during primary school has large effects on secondary school achievement, with the impact of rank being more important for boys than girls. Using additional survey data we find that the development of confidence is the most likely mechanisms for this effect on task-specific productivity. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor mayJEL-Code: I210, J240, M540.