difference-in-difference approach using administrative panel data on over 54,000 course grades of local students enrolled at … Maastricht University before and during the partial cannabis prohibition.We find that the academic performance of students who … are no longer legally permitted to buy cannabis increases substantially. Grade improvements are driven by younger students …

This paper studies how a student’s ordinal rank in a peer group affects performance and specialisation choices in … university. By exploiting data with repeated random assignment of students to teaching sections, we find that a higher rank …: improvements in rank raise performance, while decreases in rank have no effect. Rank effects partially operate through students …