(with Melissa Adelman, Francisco Haimovich and Mauricio Romero)
Forthcoming in The Journal of Labor Economics.
We evaluate a randomized dropout prevention program across 4,000 schools in Guatemala, where 30% of children leave school during the primary-to-secondary transition. Schools were assigned to receive a guidance manual and training; the manual, the training and a list of high-risk students; the manual, the training, the list, and behavioral nudges; or control. All treatments reduced dropout in the transition from primary to secondary by 1.2 percentage points from a 34% base, but effects faded after two years (i.e., there is no difference in the likelihood of being enrolled in secondary school after the first year). Still, the program increased years of schooling by 0.012, and its low cost (USD 2–3 per student) and successful large-scale implementation make it a promising, cost-effective approach to increasing schooling in resource-constrained contexts.
Link to the working paper.
(with Andrés Ham and Monica Yanez-Pagans )
Ecological Economics, 236, 2025.
We study green and carbon-intensive employment in India and discuss the implications of the ongoing green transition for the education and skill development ecosystem. Our analysis employs two definitions to identify green and carbon-intensive jobs in survey data. The first is India's official green occupations list and the second is an international classification of carbon-intensive occupations used in previous research. We apply these definitions to data from the 2019–20 Periodic Labour Force Survey to estimate the size and composition of green and carbon-intensive employment, examine their distributions across sectors and states, and characterize green and carbon-intensive workers in attributes and wages. Our results highlight the importance of monitoring green and carbon-intensive jobs with robust labor market monitoring systems to guide decisions on the sustainability transition and suggest key aspects to consider when investing in green skills and the potential distributive consequences of sustainability policies on the population.
Link to the publication
(with Carlos Rodríguez-Castelán and Hernan Winkler)
Journal of Development Studies, 60(7), 1131–1159, 2024.
What is the effect of exports on local income inequality in developing countries? To respond to this question, we combine data on exports with a panel of welfare indicators for 2000 Mexican municipalities, and implement an instrumental variable approach to address endogeneity concerns. Our results show that a 10 percent increase in the exports per worker reduces local income inequality, measured by the Gini coefficient, by 0.17 points (using a 0 to 100 scale). This is driven by income growth among households at the bottom of the income distribution. We also find that although exports do raise the total amount of labour incomes at the municipal level, average labour incomes do not change. This occurs because municipalities with growing exports also experience an increase in employment and working-age population driven by inflows of returning migrants and lower emigration outflows. Remittances also decline in response to rising exports.
Link to the publication
(with Andrés Ham and Mónica Yanez-Pagans)
Education Economics, 33(3), 333–354, 2024.
We study the short-term effects of differential exposure to COVID-19 on educational outcomes in Guatemala. The government adopted a warning index to classify municipalities by cases and infection rates in 2020. Using administrative panel data for all students in Guatemala, we employ a difference-in-differences strategy that leverages municipal differences over time in the warning index to estimate the effects of the pandemic on dropout, promotion, and school switching in 2021 and 2022. Results show that municipalities with a higher warning index had significantly larger dropout, lower promotion rates, and a greater share of students switching from private to public schools.
Link to the publication
(with Leonardo Gasparini, Mariana Marchionni, Matías Ciaschi, Santiago Garganta and María Florencia Pinto )
En Riquelme, G. (ed.). La construcción del campo de la Economía de la Educación en Argentina. Edisur y Eudeba. Cap 4, 217-266, 2023.
This chapter summarizes some recent contributions to the Economics of Education with applications to Latin American countries. Each section focuses on a different theme and reviews the available contributions for the region, particularly those made by the authors from the Center for Distributive, Labor, and Social Studies (CEDLAS) at the National University of La Plata. The selection of topics includes much of the region's contributions to the field of Economics of Education: wage gaps by educational level, intergenerational educational mobility, school segregation by socioeconomic status, effects of education on other outcomes, early warning systems for dropout prevention, and educational impacts of conditional cash transfer programs.
Link to the publication
(with Lucía Ramírez Leira)
Revista Iberoamericana sobre Calidad, Eficacia y Cambio en Educación, 18(4), 97-121, 2020.
The separation of students from different socioeconomic backgrounds between public and private schools has increased in many countries during the past few years. This article proposes a methodology to decompose changes in school segregation over time and quantify the relative importance of the different factors that may account for these changes. To illustrate its usefulness, the study provides an empirical application to the Uruguayan case, one of the Latin American countries that has experienced the greatest increase in school segregation between public and private schools in recent years. The article finds that changes in preferences for attending school account for a very small fraction of the increase in segregation in Uruguay between 1992 and 2017. In contrast, preferences for attending a private type institution played an important role in the observed change in segregation, particularly in secondary education, while changes in the budget constraint, captured via changes in income, explain most of the observed change in segregation during the period. Despite the limitations of the methodology that are discussed in the article, its use is proposed to enrich the analysis of the determinants of school segregation and help to unravel the relative contribution of different theories that are able to account for the observed changes.
Link to the publication
(with Hernan Winkler)
Economics of Transition and Institutional Change, 27 (3), 745–762, 2019.
This paper exploits variations in the timing of telecommunications reforms across Europe to investigate the relationship between the rise of alternative work arrangements and the emergence of the Internet. We evaluate whether sectors that are technologically more dependent on information and communication technologies (ICT) experienced disproportionately larger changes in their employment outcomes after telecommunications reforms were introduced. Our main results point to a disproportionate increase in total employment, part‐time work and home‐based work among ICT‐dependent sectors after the implementation of telecommunications reforms. These results suggest that telecommunications reforms affected labour market arrangements by fostering the adoption of ICT. The results are robust to several specifications.
Link to the publication
(with Mariana Marchionni)
Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 26(4), 489-515 , 2019.
In this paper, we estimate the causal effect of an extra year of schooling on mathematics performance for seven Latin American countries based on PISA 2012. To that end we exploit exogenous variation in students’ birthdates around the school entry cut-off date using both sharp and fuzzy Regression Discontinuity designs. We find strong effects of an extra year of schooling in most countries, which amount to a 30% increase in PISA test scores in Brazil, 18% in Uruguay, 7% in Argentina and 6% in Costa Rica. These effects differ from the typical estimates obtained from simple regressions or multilevel models and are large enough to allow 15-year-old students to reach higher proficiency levels, suggesting significant potential gains of reducing dropout rates in the region. Finally, we stress the importance of taking into account the effects of school entry cut-off dates on PISA samples to avoid making unfair international comparisons.
Link to the publication
(with Melissa Adelman, Francisco Haimovich and Andrés Ham )
Education Economics, 26 (4), 356-372, 2018.
School dropout is a growing concern across Latin America because of its negative social and economic consequences. Identifying who is likely to drop out, and therefore could be targeted for interventions, is a well-studied prediction problem in countries with strong administrative data. In this paper, we use new data in Guatemala and Honduras to estimate some of the first dropout prediction models for lower-middle income countries. These models correctly identify 80% of sixth grade students who will drop out within the next year, performing better than other commonly used targeting approaches and as well as models used in the U.S.
Link to the publication
Económica, 62(1), 121-184 , 2016.
This paper makes use of data provided by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in order to provide a quantification of the level and evolution of school segregation by socioeconomic status in the world, and contribute to the discussion of its determinants. Results suggest that Latin America is a region with high relative school segregation, where segregation between public and private schools is relevant. Findings also indicate that school segregation by socioeconomic status is higher in those countries and periods in which inequality and enrollment in private schools are higher, while certain patterns of geographic localization also play a significant role.
Link to the publication
(with Malena Arcidiácono, Guillermo Cruces, Leonardo Gasparini, David Jaume and Monserrat Serio)
ECLAC Social Policies Series, 195 (1), 1-35, 2014.
This paper documents and analyzes school segregation between students from different socioeconomic strata who attend public and private schools in Latin America. The study contributes with empirical evidence to the measurement of this phenomenon from the early nineties to the present. The results suggest that on average the degree of public-private school segregation in Latin America have increased in the last two decades.
Link to the publication
(with Leonardo Gasparini, David Jaume and Monserrat Serio)
Desarrollo Económico-Revista de Ciencias Sociales, 51(202-203), 189-219 , 2011.
This paper studies school segregation among students from different socioeconomic strata attending public and private schools in Argentina. The study contributes with empirical evidence to the measurement of this phenomenon from 1986 to the present, including projections to 2014. To this end, all major household surveys conducted in the country are used. The results suggest that the degree of school segregation has increased substantially since the mid-1980s to the present and is likely to continue rising in the early years of the 2010s.
Link to the publication. English version here.