“The principal idea is that individuals face a two-audience signaling quandary: signals that beget labor market success are signals that induce peer rejection,” the wrote in the report.

Lee Professor of Economic Claudia Goldin, who studies the economic histories of education, income, inequality, immigration, and technological change, praised the authors’ work.

“I have the highest respect and regard for the work of Fryer and Torelli. It is enormously creative and revealing,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Through the lens of their work we have a much better understanding of these behaviors and the functions they serve.”

Fryer and Torelli used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which surveyed more than 90,000 junior-high and high-school students from 175 schools in 80 communities around the country. Students taking the survey were asked to define their own ethnicity, Fryer said. Rather than allow students to define their own social status, the authors created a “spectral popularity index” to measure, for each student, the number of same-race friends within his or her school. They then weighted each student’s popularity by the popularity of each friend.

Torelli was not available for comment.

—Staff writer Daniel J. T. Schuker can be reached at dschuker@fas.harvard.edu.