Abstract
Educational attainment is strongly associated with fertility and family formation, yet less is known about whether students’ relative standing within schools is linked to later demographic outcomes. This study examines whether 9th-grade rank within the school GPA distribution predicts completed fertility, marriage, and divorce by age 40. Using Swedish population-wide register data (N ≈ 726,000), we compare students with similar national GPA but different relative school rank, applying school-by-cohort fixed effects to reduce selection bias. Results show that relative academic position is associated with demographic behavior net of absolute performance. Lower relative rank is linked to higher childlessness and fewer children for both women and men, and to lower marriage and higher divorce risks among men. Higher rank is primarily associated with delayed motherhood. The findings suggest that institutionalized social comparisons in compulsory schooling are linked to long-term family outcomes, consistent with reference group mechanisms.