This paper provides evidence of a novel facet of peer effects by showing that peer personality influences academic achievement.We exploit random assignment of students to university sections and find that students perform better in the presence of persistent peers. The impact of peer persistence is enduring, as students exposed to persistent peers at the beginning of their studies continue to achieve higher grades in subsequent periods. The personality peer effects that we document are distinct from other observable peer characteristics and suggest that peer personality traits affect human capital accumulation.

We conduct a natural field experiment in a retail chain to test predictions of tournament theory regarding prize spread and noise. A random subset of the 208 stores participates in two-stage elimination tournaments. Tournaments differ in the distribution of prize money across winners of the first and second rounds of the tournament. As predicted, we find that a more convex prize spread increases second-round performance at the expense of first-round performance, although the magnitude of these effects is small. Moreover, the treatment effect is larger for stores with more stable past performance.