Seminarios

Coautores: Chris Dawson y Joanna Syrda

Abstract: Ranking of performance plays an important role in educational attainment. We consider data from a cohort of high-school students in Chile and track them from age-14 all the way through to making choices about higher education and indeed sitting national college entry exams (PSU). To deal with endogeneity of non-random assignment to classes we propose a novel instrument. We estimate the impact of high-school ranking, conditional on ability, on educational outcomes and decisions. We look at subject specialization in high-school and performance in college entry exams. Additionally, we look at the dynamic effects of rank (within-person changes in rank). We find a strong positive effect of rank on PSU performance and subject choice. There are gender differences in how rank affects performance and specialization choices since men appear more likely to use ordinal rank as a measure of ability or are more likely to exploit it.