, and a natural experiment conducted on, students from the United States Naval Academy (USNA). We develop a conceptual … rich set of covariates and the random assignment of students to peer groups. We find that students can be influenced by …

achievement. We exploit random assignment of students to university sections and find that students perform better in the presence … of more persistent peers and more risk-averse peers. In particular, low-persistence students benefit from highly …-persistent peers without devoting additional efforts to studying. However, highly-persistent students are not affected by the …

Social theories posit that peers affect students' academic self-concept (ASC). Most prominently, Big …-Fish-Little-Pond, invidious comparison, and relative deprivation theories predict that exposure to academically stronger peers decreases students …' ASC, and exposure to academically weaker peers increases students' ASC. These propositions have not yet been tested …