The Integrated Postsecondary Data System contains a rich set of information about U.S. colleges and universities. As part of this information, institutions can identify a ``custom comparison group'' of peer institutions. 80% of the nearly 1500 institutions we consider in this work provided such...

Do individuals choose their reference groups, i.e. their Joneses, or are they culturally transmitted across generations? We provide evidence that feeds the theoretical debate about the endogeneity or exogeneity of reference groups. Our findings for Uruguay suggest that reference groups are...

We study how restrictive immigration policies and the unexpected loss of peers affect the performance of skilled migrants, exploiting the unexpected increased denials of H-1B visa extensions in the United States beginning in 2017. We find that employees who lost peers of the same ethnic...

We examine search-based peer (SBP) groups proposed by Lee, Ma, and Wang (2015) and their relationship with commonality in liquidity. Our results confirm that SBP affiliation is a significant determinant of commonality in liquidity and, unlike market- and industry-commonality, SBP-commonality has...