Friendship Relations in the School Class and Adult Economic Attainment

We analyze the impact of adolescents' friendship relations in their final-year class of highschool on subsequent labor market success. Based on a typology of network positions we locateeach student within the social system of the school class as either: an isolate, a sycophant,a broker or a receiver. These positions identify individuals' social standing within the groupof classmates and proxy for their interpersonal behavior and social competencies. We offerempirical evidence that differential social standing in adolescence predicts large and persistent earnings disparities over the entire life course. The estimated wage premia and penaltiesdo not appear to be substantially confounded by measures of family and school resources,and materialize largely independent of differences in cognitive abilities, grade rank in class orfriends' characteristics. A moderate share of the earnings inequalities is mediated by differential post-secondary human and social capital investment. From a conceptual point of view, wecontribute an application of egocentered network methods within conventional labor economicsurvey research.