Why Try? The Superstar Effect in Academic Performance

Rey Hernández-Julián () and Christina Peters ()
Additional contact information
Rey Hernández-Julián: Metropolitan State University of Denver
Christina Peters: Metropolitan State University of Denver

Eastern Economic Journal, 2022, vol. 48, issue 1, No 6, 147-165

Abstract: Abstract Although the superstar effect has been documented in sports tournaments, there are few empirical tests outside sports. We estimate the impact of superstars in a classroom. We find that college students in a classroom with superior academic performers earn grades about 1% lower than when they are in classrooms without such outliers. Outliers at the bottom end of the distribution are also harmful. Since high achievers perform worse in the presence of outliers at both the top and low end of the academic distribution, we argue that the manipulation of incentives is the mechanism behind our estimated effect.

Keywords: Superstar effect; Academic performance; Inequality; Competition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 I21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1057/s41302-021-00197-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:easeco:v:48:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1057_s41302-021-00197-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/41302

DOI: 10.1057/s41302-021-00197-5

Access Statistics for this article

Eastern Economic Journal is currently edited by Allan Zebedee and Cynthia Bansak

More articles in Eastern Economic Journal from Palgrave Macmillan, Eastern Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().