Research

Publications

With a little help from my friends: Medium-term effects of a remedial education program targeting Roma minority with Marianna Battaglia

Forthcoming in Economics of Education Review

A poor-performing student can achieve better results by following the footprints of an older friend. In this paper, we study a remedial education program that takes advantage of this phenomenon. Introduced in Serbian primary schools in 2009, the Roma Teaching Assistant Program targets underachieving students belonging to the Roma minority. It assigns one person, usually Roma, to each school participating to provide support to targeted pupils and create a bridge with their community. We estimate its medium-term effects on educational attainments at the end of primary school by comparing students in schools participating and in schools that applied, but were not selected, before and after the introduction of the program. The impacts on marks and standardized test scores are modest, although positive and bigger in schools with a lower percentage of Roma. Roma students are, however, more likely to choose longer secondary school tracks, a requirement for entering higher education.

Segregation, Fertility and Son Preference: The Case of the Roma in Serbia with Marianna Battaglia and Bastien Chabé-Ferret

Journal of Demographic Economics, 2021, Vol 72 (2), pp. 233 - 260
We study the link between residential segregation and fertility for the socially excluded and marginalized Roma ethnic minority. Using original survey data we collected in Serbia, we investigate whether fertility differs between ethnically homogeneous and mixed neighborhoods. Our results show that Roma in less segregated areas tend to have significantly fewer children (around 0.8). Most of the difference arises from Roma in less segregated areas waiting substantially more after having a boy than their counterparts in more segregated areas. We exploit variation in the share of Serbian sounding .rst names to provide evidence that a mechanism at play is a shift in preferences towards lower fertility and sons rather than daughters induced by a higher exposure to the Serbian majority culture.

The Effect of Residential Segregation on Formal and Informal Employment of Roma in Serbia

Eastern European Economics, 2020, Vol. 58(2), pp. 108-136

This paper aims to examine whether the degree of residential segregation affects formal and informal employment of the Roma ethic minority in Serbia. Data from World Bank's Living Standard Measurement Survey are used together with the census data on segregation for the analysis. I exploit the within district variation in the percentage of Roma to identify the effect of segregation on labour market outcomes and I use historical rates of Roma in a census tract to instrument for present segregation. The results show that Roma in more segregated localities are more likely to hold a job in the informal sector than Roma in less segregated localities. The results suggest that a one standard deviation increase or equivalently an increase of 10 percentage points in residential segregation raises the probability of a worker to be employed in the informal sector by 8 percentage points. The instrument suggests that workers who are less employable in the informal sector sort into more segregated areas. There is suggestive evidence that the positive effect of segregation is driven by the information spillovers between Roma. I do not find an effect of residential segregation on employment in the formal sector.

The curse of low expectations : Remedial education and perceived returns to education of Roma people with Marianna Battaglia

Economics of Transition, 2017, Vol. 25(4), pp. 681-721

We examine how a remedial education programme for primary school-age children affects parental expectations about their children's future. Using original survey data we collected in Serbia, we investigate whether expectations on labour market prospects and educational attainment change as a consequence of exposure to the Roma Teaching Assistant programme. Our results show that parents of pupils in treated schools expect higher returns to education for their children and are more likely to expect them to achieve a secondary level of education. We also investigate the possible mechanisms in place due to the characteristics of the programme: remedial education and role model.

Welfare State and Social Enterprises in Transition: Evidence from Serbia with Jelena Žarković Rakić, Ana Aleksić Mirić and Marko Vladisavljević

Voluntas, 2017, Vol. 28(6), pp. 2423-2448.

This paper analyses welfare regime changes in Serbia and their impact on social enterprise development in the last two decades. We cover the period of significant transition-related reforms within the welfare state, with important implications on the position of these enterprises. Using data gathered from the qualitative field research, our study shows that there are two broad groups of factors that are important for development of the new generation of social enterprises, those that emerged in the last decade with an idea to foster entrepreneurial spirit and expanded into new domains other than those providing assistance to the marginalized groups. First, their decision to enter the social economy sector still depends on the environment created by the state. Secondly, their sustainability is affected by the factors typically found in any other enterprise of comparable scale like business skills, capacity to form networks and partner with relevant stakeholders.

Equal Access to Education: An Evaluation of a Roma Teaching Assistant Programme with Marianna Battaglia

World Development, 2015, Vol. 76, pp. 62-81

This paper investigates the effects of a remedial education programme - the Roma Teaching Assistant Programme targeting the socially excluded and marginalised Roma ethnic minority in Serbia. By using first-hand collected data, we find evidence that children exposed to the programme went more to school. We do not find an effect on dropouts or marks for all grades. An examination of heterogenous effects suggests that children in the first grade benefitted more from the programme as compared to their older peers through lower dropouts and better grades. Overall, our results suggest that well-targeted remedial education programmes can be successful in boosting outcomes of low performers.

Assessing Education's Contribution to Productivity Using Firm-Level Evidence with Vincent Vandenberghe

International Journal of Manpower, 2014, 35(8), pp. 1116-1139

Awarded Outstanding paper of 2014 by journal's editorial team

There is plenty of individual-level evidence, based on the estimation of Mincerian equations, showing that better-educated individuals earn more. This is usually

interpreted as a proof that education raises labour productivity. Some macroeconomists, analysing cross-country time series, also support the idea that the

continuous expansion of education has contributed positively to growth. Surprisingly, most economists with an interest in human capital have neglected the level

of the firm to study the education-productivity-wage nexus. And the few published works considering firm-level evidence are lacking a proper strategy to cope with

the endogeneity problem inherent to the estimation of production and wage functions. This paper taps into a rich, firm-level, Belgian panel database that contains

information on productivity, labour cost and the workforce's educational attainment. It aims at providing estimates of the causal effect of education on productivity

and wage/labour costs. Therefore, it exclusively resorts to within firm changes to deal with time-invariant heterogeneity bias. What is more, it addresses the risk of

simultaneity bias (endogeneity of firms education-mix choices in the short run) using the structural approach suggested by Ackerberg, Caves & Frazer (2006),

alongside more traditional system-generalized method of moments (GMM) methods (Blundell & Bond, 1998) where lagged values of labour inputs are used as

instruments. Results suggest that human capital, in particular larger shares of university-educated workers inside firms, translate into significantly higher firm-level

labour productivity, and that labour costs are relatively well aligned on education-driven labour productivity differences. In other words, we find evidence that the

Mincerian relationship between education and individual wages is driven by a strong positive link between education and firm-level productivity.

Selected work in progress

Child penalty in Russia: Evidence from an event study with Cristiano Perugini and Marko Vladisavljević (R&R at Review of Economics of the Household)

Operation Allied Force: Unintended Consequences of the NATO Bombing on Children's Outcomes with Giuseppe Migali, Miloš Popović and Sunčica Vujić Submitted

Simulating the workplace: A (better) alternative to improve labor market outcomes of disadvantaged youth? with Jochen Kluve and Jonathan Stöterau

Policy papers

Early Childhood Development: The analysis of Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey data (2016)

Paper (external link)