Juan S. Muñoz-Morales

I am a CNRS researcher at LEM and an associate professor of economics at IÉSEG School of Management (on leave until February 2026). I am currently visiting the economics department at Sciences Po, Paris. Additionally, I am a research affiliate at IZA and a J-PAL invited researcher.

My research focuses on development and labor economics, with a particular interest in education and policy evaluation in developing economies.

I am the organizer of the IFLAME Seminar Series. Please contact me in case you want to present.

Contact:

Email: j.munoz[at]ieseg[dot]fr

Address: 1 parvis de la Défense, 92044 Paris-La Défense cedex – France.

Link to my CV: Here

Publications and Forthcoming

Signaling and Migrant Labor Market Integration: Experimental evidence from Colombia.

Joint with Matías Busso, Carolina Gonzalez-Velosa, Juanita Ruiz, Cynthia Van der Werf, Juan D. Valencia.

Conditionally accepted via Pre-Results Review at the Journal of Development Economics.

AEA Registry | Pre-results | JDE Pre-Results

Labor market signaling plays a crucial role in the job-matching process by reducing information frictions faced by employers. In this paper, we analyze whether the returns to signaling vary based on the accuracy of ex-ante signals. We estimate the heterogeneous returns to signaling by comparing locals and migrants, who differ in the accuracy of their available education signals. Our analysis employs data from a skill certification program in Colombia that provides both locals and migrants with a common credible signal within the labor market. Selection into the program was randomized, with 30 percent of spots allocated to migrants. Our estimation strategy leverages this random assignment to estimate the heterogeneous returns to signaling for both locals and migrants. Our findings offer valuable insights for policy improvements aimed at enhancing the labor market integration of migrants by assessing the heterogeneous returns of labor market signaling.

Signaling Specific Skills and the Labor Market of College Graduates.

Joint with Matías Busso and Sebastián Montaño.

Forthcoming at the Review of Economics and Statistics.
DOI | Replication Files | Online Appendix | IZA Working Paper | IDB Working Paper

Awarded the first place in the IDB Knowledge Excellence Prize

Using administrative data and a regression discontinuity design, we study the labor market effects of a government-sponsored award given to top-performing students on Colombia’s national college exit exam. The award signals field-specific skills, leading recipients to earn seven to ten percent more than comparable peers without the signal. The benefits are concentrated among graduates from lower-reputation institutions, who enter the market with weaker signals and gain access to better job matches and higher-paying firms. These returns persist for up to five years, driven by an upward shift in the intercept of the wage-experience profile of those with weaker signals.

Flooding the Brains: Natural Disasters, Student Outcomes, and the Urban-Rural Gap in Human Capital.

Economic Development and Cultural Change, October 2025, Volume 74, Number 1, pp. 85-115.

DOI | Replication Files | Online Appendix | IZA Working Paper

Press Coverage: La Silla Vacía.

This study provides evidence that natural disasters negatively affect student outcomes, potentially explaining the lower academic achievement of students in rural areas compared to their urban counterparts in developing countries. Using data from the Colombian school census, I estimate a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits variation from an unusual rainfall shock affecting over two million people in both urban and rural Colombia. The results show that these disruptions increase school dropout rates and reduce learning outcomes for at least a decade. The effects are concentrated in rural schools, while students in urban schools remain unaffected. I explore several mechanisms and rule out the possibility that the effects are driven by selective migration or a loss of educational resources. Instead, I find evidence that the rainfall shock exacerbated poverty, pushing poorer rural children into unemployment and longer work hours.

Unbundling Returns to Postsecondary Degrees and Skills: Evidence from Colombia.

Joint with Matías Busso and Sebastián Montaño.

Education Economics, 2025, volume 33, issue 1.

DOI | IDB Working Paper | IZA Working Paper

Using longitudinal data of college graduates in Colombia, we estimate labor market returns to postsecondary degrees and to various skills - including literacy, numeracy, foreign language, and field-specific skills. Graduates of academic programs and schools of higher reputation obtain higher earnings relative to vocational public programs. A one standard deviation increase in each skill predicts average earnings increases of one to three percent. Returns vary along the earnings distribution, with tenure, with the degree of job specialization, and by gender. Our results imply that degrees and skills capture different human capital components that are rewarded differently in the labor market.

The Unintended Consequences of Merit-Based Teacher Selection: Evidence from a Large-Scale Reform in Colombia.

Joint with Matías Busso, Sebastián Montaño, and Nolan Pope.

Journal of Public Economics, November 2024, volume 239, 105238.

DOI | NBER Working Paper | IZA Working Paper

Press Coverage: NBER Digest; CATO Research Briefs in Economic Policy ; VoxDev; IZA World of Labor; La Silla Vacía.

Teacher quality is a key factor in improving student academic achievement. As such, educational policymakers strive to design systems to hire the most effective teachers. This paper examines the effects of a national policy reform in Colombia that established a merit-based teacher-hiring system intended to enhance teacher quality and improve student learning. Implemented in 2005 for all public schools, the policy ties teacher-hiring decisions to candidates' performance on an exam evaluating subject-specific knowledge and teaching aptitude. The implementation of the policy led to many experienced contract teachers being replaced by high exam-performing novice teachers. We find that though the policy sharply increased pre-college test scores of teachers, it also decreased the overall stock of teacher experience and led to sharp decreases in students' exam performance and educational attainment. Using a difference-in-differences strategy to compare the outcomes of students from public and private schools over two decades, we show that the hiring reform decreased students' performance on high school exit exams by 8 percent of a standard deviation, and reduced the likelihood that students enroll in and graduate from college by more than 10 percent. The results underscore that relying exclusively on specific ex ante measures of teacher quality to screen candidates, particularly at the expense of teacher experience, may unintentionally reduce students' learning gains.

Some Children Left Behind: Variation in the Effects of an Educational Intervention.

Joint with Julie Buhl-Wiggers, Jason Kerwin, Jeff Smith, and Rebecca Thornton.

Journal of Econometrics, July 2024, volume 243, issues 1-2.

DOI | Replication Files | NBER Working Paper | IZA Working Paper

Press Coverage: VoxDev.

We document substantial variation in the effects of a highly-effective literacy program in northern Uganda. The program increases test scores by 1.40 SDs on average, but standard statistical bounds show that the impact standard deviation exceeds 1.0 SD. This implies that the variation in effects across our students is wider than the spread of mean effects across all randomized evaluations of developing country education interventions in the literature. This very effective program does indeed leave some students behind. At the same time, we do not learn much from our analyses that attempt to determine which students benefit more or less from the program. We reject rank preservation, and the weaker assumption of stochastic increasingness leaves wide bounds on quantile-specific average treatment effects. Neither conventional nor machine-learning approaches to estimating systematic heterogeneity capture more than a small fraction of the variation in impacts given our available candidate moderators

Do school shootings erode property values?

Joint with Ruchi Singh.

Regional Science and Urban Economics, 98, January 2023.

DOI | IFLAME Working Paper

Press Coverage: UI News; OZY; Realtor.com.

We examine how residential property values are impacted by school shootings, which are crimes that have a very low probability of being repeated in the same location. We exploit the exogenous timing of eleven mass shootings that took place between 1998 and 2014, and use a difference-in-differences framework to estimate the causal effect of these school shootings on property values in the affected school attendance area. We find that house prices decline by an average of around 2.4 percent in a four-year period after a mass school shooting. We also find that enrollment falls in the affected school district, suggesting that families subsequently avoid schools in areas that have experienced such events.

The Economics Behind the Math Gender Gap: Colombian Evidence on the Role of Sample Selection.

Journal of Development Economics, 2018, 135, pp. 368-391.

DOI

Featured in: Marginal Revolution.

The literature that has previously shown that boys outperform girls in math tests has failed to explain the underlying causes of the phenomenon. This math gender gap has been documented to vary across countries, and shown to grow as students advance through school. In this paper I suggest that these patterns may be explained by sample selection caused by gender differences in schooling's opportunity costs, which lead lower-achieving males to drop out. I present and test the implications of a labor supply model that examines the opportunity cost of school attendance and, thereby, the observed math gender gap. Using an exogenous policy change, the launch of a conditional cash transfer program in Colombia, I estimate that sample selection explains between 50 percent and 60 percent of the gap. Estimates of non-parametric bounds show that selection in the lower quantiles of the male distribution explains a significant portion of the gap.

Enrollment, Graduation, and Dropout Rates in Latin America, Is the glass half empty or half full?

Joint with Marina Bassi and Matías Busso.

Economia. Fall 2015. pp. 113-156.

IDB Working Paper

Press Coverage: Huffington Post.

We use 292 household surveys from eighteen Latin American countries to document patterns in secondary school graduation rates over the period 1990–2010. We find that enrollment and graduation rates increased during that period, while dropout rates decreased. We provide two types of explanations for these patterns. Countries implemented changes on the supply side to improve access, by increasing the resources allocated to education and designing policies to help students stay in school. Despite this progress, graduation rates are still generally low, and there are remarkable gaps in educational outcomes in terms of gender, income quintiles, and regions within countries. The quality of education is also generally low.

Working Papers

Complements or Substitutes? Labor Market Effects of Foreign Inputs in Developing Economies.

Joint with Leonardo Bonilla-Mejía and Roman D. Zárate.

Revisions requested at the Journal of International Economics.

This paper uses a trade liberalization episode in Colombia to examine the impact of trade on labor markets when labor and intermediate inputs are either complements or substitutes. By exploiting exogenous tariff variation, we isolate the effects of the reform into two distinct channels: a foreign input shock and a competition shock. While import competition reduces the wage bill, the input shock increases it. The input shock has positive effects on services and highly heterogeneous effects on agriculture and manufacturing. To explore these dynamics, we incorporate a CES production function, which allows labor and intermediate inputs to be complements or substitutes into a dynamic quantitative trade model. Using reduced-form coefficients, we calibrate the elasticity of substitution and find that labor and inputs are substitutes in agriculture and manufacturing but complements in services. We then simulate a counterfactual scenario based on changes in the tariff path. Our results show that allowing for a more flexible production function significantly alters the effects of trade on structural transformation. Specifically, the tariff shock leads to a reallocation of workers towards the service sector and fewer workers towards agriculture and manufacturing, compared to the Cobb-Douglas case. In terms of welfare, the average worker experiences similar gains under both the CES and Cobb-Douglas specifications. However, this result masks substantial heterogeneity, with some workers in manufacturing facing significant welfare losses.

Considered for the special issue on Trade and Uneven Development.

Life-Cycle Wage Growth and Firm Productivity in Developed and Developing Economies

Submitted.

Joint with Kerstin Holzheu.

Life-cycle wage growth varies significantly across countries. We examine the role of the local distribution of firm productivity in shaping life-cycle wages by introducing a random search model that disentangles the effects of firm productivity distribution, on-the-job learning, and labor market frictions. Estimates of the model for Brazil, Colombia, and the United States suggest that the shape and scale of the firm-type distribution are key factors in explaining life-cycle wage growth. Counterfactual simulations suggest that equating the firm-type distribution in Brazil and Colombia to that of the United States would substantially reduce the cross-country gap in workers’ life-cycle wage trajectories.

Compensation vs. Reinforcement: Experimental Identification of Parental Aversion to Inequality in Offspring.

Joint with Felipe Barrera-Osorio, Leonardo Bonilla, Matías Busso, Sebastián Galiani, Hyunjae Kang, and Juan Pantano.

AEA Registry

The allocation of resources within the household has been extensively theorized, but empirical evidence on this topic has been very scarce. Endogeneity concerns hinder this type of analysis due to the lack of identifying variation within the household. In this paper, we overcome these difficulties by exploiting a unique setting that introduced random variation in resource allocation within households. We evaluate the effects of a program that provided alternative delivery methods of conditional cash transfers in Bogotá, Colombia, and allocated resources at the student level. The individual randomization implied that some households had treated and untreated siblings, allowing us to extend the analysis to estimate spillover effects of the program on beneficiaries and their siblings. Students were randomly allocated to a standard design and a design that prioritized enrollment in tertiary education. We find that standard delivery methods increase educational outcomes for treated children but decrease the same outcomes for untreated siblings of treated students. We rationalize the results by estimating a structural model that uses the standard delivery method for estimation and the alternative delivery method for validation

Selected Work in Progress

Information Restrictions and Migrant Labor Market Integration.

Joint with Matías Busso, Carolina Gonzalez-Velosa, and Cynthia Van der Werf.

In the field

Using Artificial Intelligence to Improve Student Learning in the Developing World.

Joint with Felipe Barrera-Osorio.

In the field

How Many Children Left Behind? A Meta-Analysis of Treatment Effect Heterogeneity in Developing-Country Education Programs

Joint with Hanna Han, Jason Kerwin, Jeff Smith, and Rebecca Thornton.

Seasonality, School Calendar, and School Enrollment: Quasi-experimental evidence from Rural Colombia.

Joint with Leonardo Peñaloza-Pacheco and Abu Shonchoy.

We assess whether crop seasonality impacts school dropout rates in rural areas. Schooling calendars often coincide with harvesting calendars in numerous regions, posing a significant challenge for rural students in developing countries due to the substantial increase in the opportunity cost of remaining enrolled in school. To investigate this phenomenon, we leverage variation resulting from an unexpected change in school calendars among public schools in two states in Colombia, leading to an increased overlap in the number of weeks between school attendance and harvesting seasons. The findings reveal that this overlap resulted in a higher incidence of school dropouts, suggesting that a potential policy solution for addressing high dropout rates in rural schools is to adjust the school and harvesting calendars.

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