This article establishes a new fact about educational production: ordinal academic rank during primary school has lasting impacts on secondary school achievement that are independent of underlying ability. Using data on the universe of English school students, we exploit naturally occurring differences in achievement distributions across primary school classes to estimate the impact of class rank. We find large effects on test scores, confidence, and subject choice during secondary school, even though these students have a new set of peers and teachers who are unaware of the students’ prior ranking in primary school. The effects are especially pronounced for boys, contributing to an observed gender gap in the number of Maths courses chosen at the end of secondary school. Using a basic model of student effort allocation across subjects, we distinguish between learning and non-cognitive skills mechanisms, finding support for the latter.

This paper investigates the impact of schools banning mobile phones on student test scores. By surveying schools in four English cities regarding their mobile phone policies and combining it with administrative data, we find that student performance in high stakes exams significantly increases post ban. We use a difference in differences (DID) strategy, exploiting variations in schools' autonomous decisions to ban these devices, conditioning on a range of student characteristics and prior achievement. Our results indicate that these increases in performance are driven by the lowestachieving students. This suggests that restricting mobile phone use can be a low-cost policy to reduce educational inequalities.Keywords: Mobile phones, technology, student performance, productivity JEL codes: I21; I28; O33; J24 This paper was produced as part of the Centre's Education and Skills Programme. The Centre for Economic Performance is financed by the Economic and Social Research Council.We would like to thank Andriana Bellou, Vincent Boucher, Dave Card, David Karp, Briggs Depew, Christian Dustman, Ozkan Eren, Baris Kaymak, Stephen Machin, Naci Mocan, Ismael Yacoub Mourifie, Daniel Parent, Shqiponja Telhaj, Felix Weinhardt, and seminar participants at AEFP, APPAM, RES, IAWEE, University of Montreal and the University of Texas at Austin for comments and discussions. We would also like to thank Guillaume Cote, Fan Duan and Vlad Khripunov for excellent research assistance. Any remaining errors are our own.Louis-Philippe Beland, Louisiana State University. Richard Murphy, University of Texas at Austin and Associate at Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics.Published by Centre for Economic Performance London School of Economics and Political Science Houghton Street London WC2A 2AE All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher nor be issued to the public or circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.Requests for permission to reproduce any article or part of the Working Paper should be sent to the editor at the above address. L-P Beland and R. Murphy, submitted 2015. IntroductionTechnological advancements are commonly viewed as leading to increased productivity.Numerous studies document the benefits of technology on productivity in the workplace and on human capital accumulation. 1 There are, however, potential drawbacks to new technologies, as they may provide distractions and reduce productivity. Mobile phones can be a source of great disruption in workplaces and classrooms, as they provide individuals with access to texting, games, social media and the Internet. Given these features, mobile phones have the potential to reduce the attention students pay to classes and can therefore be detrimental to learning.There are debates in many countries as to how schools should address the issue of mobile phones. Some advocate for a comp...

for their comments and suggestions. We also thank participants of the 2017 Higher Education, Funding & Access Seminar at the University of Edinburgh, and participants of the 2016 Northwestern University economics workshop for comments and suggestions. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Private schooling is an important feature of education systems across the world. Despite its relatively small size, the British private school sector has a long history and plays a prominent role in society. We provide evidence showing that private schools have been successful in transforming their ability to generate the academic outputs that are most in demand in the modern economy: the private/state school wage differential has risen significantly over time, and a significant factor has been faster rising educational attainment for privately‐educated individuals.

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