The effect of ordinal rank i school on educational achievement and income in Sweden

This paper investigates the effect of the academic ordinal rank position of Swedish grade 9 students relative to their school peers on future educational achievement and adult earnings. The hypothesis that is examined is thus whether the student’s ranking in the class itself affects the student’s later school results, and that this effect goes beyond the direct effects of the student’s absolute knowledge. This type of “ordinal rank effect” differs from the effects of classmates’ average abilities; the kind of “peer effects”on which much of the previous literature has focused.

The analysis is conducted using data on the population of Swedish students during the 1990s.