A perception at the core of studies that consider the link between social rank and stress (typically measured by the so-called stress hormone cortisol) is that the link is direct. Examples of such studies are Bartolomucci (2007), Beery and Kaufer (2015), and Koolhaas et al. (2017). A recent and...

In this study, we examine the impact of a student's household socioeconomic status (SES) rank within a class on two critical factors affecting the accumulation of human capital: school bullying victimization and school absence. We identify the effect from the variation of a within-class SES rank...

We leverage the timing of pandemic-induced school closures to learn about the emergence of ordinal rank effects in education. Using administrative data from Italian middle schools for four cohorts of students, our study reveals that disrupting peer interactions during the first year of middle...

This paper investigates the effect of grouping students by prior achievement into different classes (or schools) in settings where students are competing for admission to programs offering only a limited number of places. We first develop a model that identifies the conditions under which the...

In recent years there has been a plethora of empirical papers by economists concerning the effects of academic rank in school or college on subsequent outcomes of students. We review this recent literature, describing the difficult identification and measurement issues, the assumptions and...

In a 1-year randomized controlled trial involving thousands of university students, we provide real-time private feedback on relative performance in a semester-long online assignment. Within this setup, our experimental design cleanly identifies the behavioral response to rank incentives (i.e.,...

Family-owned firms account for majority of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Arab countries, but evidence on the impact of this ownership type on access to credit in the region is scarce. Yet the issue is key for understanding barriers to the emergence of dynamic private sector and...

The vast majority of firms in developing economies are micro and small enterprises owned by families whose members also provide the labour to the units. Often, they fail to grow in size even with the relaxation of credit constraints. In this paper, we show that frictions in the labour market...