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PUBLICATIONS
PUBLICATIONS
Gender inequalities in violence victimization and depression in Brazil: results from the 2019 national health survey (with Mrejen, M., Rosa, L., Rosa, D., & Hone, T). International journal for equity in health, 22(1), 100, 2023
Trends in the academic achievement gap between high and low social class children: The case of Brazil (with Carnoy and Simoes). International Journal of Educational Development, 94, 102650, 2022
The effects of public high school subsidies on student test scores : The case of a full-day high school program in Pernambuco, Brazil (with Eric Bettinger, Martin Carnoy, and Pedro Dantas) in Economics of Education Review - Volume 87, April 2022
Education in Brazil and Latin America is typically associated with a shorter school day than in most OECD countries. This paper assess the impact of a Brazilian policy that extends the high school day on student test scores. The program lengthens the school day while adding resources for participating schools. The number of instructional hours for math and language classes increased by 50% and 20%, respectively. Our estimates show that over three years of high school (10th to 12th grades), the full-day school program increased math and language student test scores by 0.22 and 0.19 standard deviations respectively. Our results are robust to several specification checks that aim to mitigate potential selection bias concerns.
Achievement gains from reconfiguring early schooling: The case of Brazil's primary education reform (with Martin Carnoy and Marcelo Martins) in Economics of Education Review - Volume 68, February 2019, Pages 1-12
We estimate the effect on primary school students’ achievement of a Brazilian policy that changed the entry age into first grade from seven to six years old. Before the policy, a typical child spent up to three years in pre-school, and four years in primary school. The reform reorganized the system so that pupils would spend two years in pre-school (at ages 4 and 5) and five years in primary education. The timing of national tests and of the incremental process of implementing the reorganization allowed us to use a DDD approach to make causal estimates of its effect on student achievement. The reform increased 5th grade students’ mathematics scores by 0.10 standard deviations and reading scores by 0.12 standard deviations over student gains in untreated schools. These effects are robust across various treated cohorts, and across alternative samples of schools.
Stuck in Place? A Field Experiment on the Effects of Reputational Information on Student Evaluations (with James Chu , Guirong Li , Prashant Loyalka , Chengfang Liu, and Yanyan Li) in Social Forces, 2019 - URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soz097
Studies suggest that students’ prior performance can shape subsequent teacher evaluations, but the magnitude of reputational effects and their implications for educational inequality remain unclear. Existing scholarship presents two major perspectives that exist in tension: do teachers primarily use reputational information as a temporary signal that is subsequently updated in response to actual student performance? Or do teachers primarily use reputational information as a filter that biases perception of subsequent evidence, thus crystallizing student reputations and keeping previously poor-performing students stuck in place? In a field experiment, we recruited a random sample of 832 junior high school teachers from the second-most populous province of China to grade a sequence of four essays written by the same student, and we randomly assign both the academic reputation of the student and the quality of the essays produced. We find that (1) reputational information influences how teachers grade, (2) teachers rely on negative information more heavily than positive information, and (3) negative reputations are crystallized by a single behavioral confirmation. These results suggest that students can escape their prior reputations, but to do so, they must contradict them immediately, with a single confirmation sufficient to crystallize a negative reputation.
WORKING PAPERS
WORKING PAPERS
- Last version - Conferences: Ridge - Health economics network (2022) - Press coverage: Estado de São Paulo
- Last version - Prize: Brazilian Econometric Society - Best Applied Microeconomics Paper - Previously called: "Subsidies for High Schools and Schooling Decisions"
- Last version - Previously circulated as: Teacher Preferences in Developing Countries Evidences from the City of Sao Paulo, Brazil - Version presented in LACEA/LAMES - Press coverage: Escolhas by Antônio Gois (Portuguese)
WORK IN PROGRESS
WORK IN PROGRESS
Messages to bring patients to primary care: an RCT experiment
Effects of expanding working hours on primary care: the case of Brazil
Effects of introducing electronic medical records on primary care production.
High school choice: results from a discrete choice experiment with Brazilian high school students
The mental health of middle school students during the pandemics: the role of connectivity
Teacher credentials and student achievement
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