In this paper we show that a student's ordinal rank in a high school cohort is an important determinant of engaging in risky behaviors. Using longitudinal data from representative US high schools, and exploiting idiosyncratic variation in the cohort composition within a school, we find a strong...

We investigate the effects of the introduction of a population-wide Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination program on the vaccine take-up of the targeted group of 15-year-old girls and their older sisters. For identification, we rely on a regression discontinuity design and high-quality Danish...

This paper studies the effect of multigrading-mixing children of different ages in the same classroom-on students' short- versus long-term academic achievement in Italy. We cope with the endogeneity of multigrading (and class size) through an instrumental variable identification strategy based...

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...