Department of Economics Associate Professor Rafael Ribas and his co-author published their article, “The Impact of Peer Performance and Relative Rank on Managerial Career Attainment: Evidence from College Students,” in Management Science. Their study suggests that being surrounded by top-performing peers can actually hurt a student’s career prospects by making them feel lower-ranked, even if their abilities are strong.
In this study, Ribas examines how class rank influences a student’s chance of becoming a manager in the future. He analyzed data from a top university in Brazil, where students are divided into two groups based on their admission scores. He compared students who just barely made it into the higher-ranked class with those who just missed the cutoff and were placed in the lower-ranked class. The results showed that students with lower rankings in the high-achieving class were 10% less likely to become managers soon after graduation compared to similar students in the lower-ranked class. This negative effect was seen in both men and women at first, but over time they found it faded for men while continued for women.