Research

WORKING PAPERS

PFAS Exposure and Cognitive Development: Evidence from an Italian Environmental Incident  [draft coming soon]

PFAS, highly persist chemicals widely used in manufacturing, are found in the blood of people and animals all over the world. While many studies associate PFAS exposure to adverse health and developmental effects in humans, there is currently no causal evidence on this association. This paper exploits a major European PFAS contamination incident to provide first-hand causal evidence on the relationship between water-borne PFAS exposure and cognitive development. For decades close to thirty municipalities in the Italian Veneto Region were served PFAS-contaminated water by the local public water supplier. Potential exposure stopped only in 2013, when the incident was discovered. I identify the overall effect of PFAS pollution on academic performance exploiting the setup as a geographic quasi-experiment (GQE): children studying in schools in contaminated municipalities before 2014 exhibit 10% of a standard deviation lower academic performance than children studying in close-by schools. To identify intensive margin effects of the contaminant I examine whether educational performance of contaminated children improves with PFAS decay in a continuous-treatment difference-in-differences (CDD) setup. CDD estimates are in line with GQE estimates when using the same geographical restrictions, but twice as large when accounting for potential contamination spill-overs. I conclude that cognitive effects of PFAS contamination are non-permanent, exposure-driven, and not confined to areas of direct exposure. Heterogeneity in treatment effects is broadly consistent with mechanisms described in the medical literature.

The Impact of Early Grading on Academic Choices and Educational Outcomes [revised papers coming soon]

Awarded the Unicredit & Universities Best Job Market Paper Award as "The Impact of Early Grading on Academic Choices: Mechanisms and Social Implications"

[pdf (Unicredit & Universities Working Paper)]

This paper provides the first causal evidence on whether assigning grades during early compulsory school affects students’ education choices, educational attainment, and labor market outcomes. To identify treatment effects, I exploit the staggered implementation of a reform which postponed grade assignment in Swedish compulsory school. Survey data matched to register data allows me to study heterogeneity in the effect of grade assignment along relevant dimensions, academic ability, socioeconomic status and gender, and inspect siblings spillovers.

Peer Effects in Education: When Beliefs Matter [pdf (final draft)]

(this paper was previously circulated with the title "Does Peer Ability Affect Education Choices?")

Recent literature explains the puzzling finding of zero or negative peer effects in academic achievement assuming that better peers negatively affect beliefs about ability (self-concept), motivation or peer interactions. This paper provides new evidence on such negative mechanisms, and on their impact on educational choices and attainment for students randomly assigned in compulsory school to classes with different cognitive ability. Using detailed longitudinal data on a nationally representative sample of Swedish compulsory school students, I find that students exposed to higher ability peers systematically underestimate their ability and are less likely to choose advanced subjects throughout compulsory school. While these students perform better, as measured by national test scores, they are assigned lower grades in subjects lacking national test scores, suggesting distortions in teachers’ assessment of student performance. Negative effects persist after compulsory school: students exposed to better peers have lower well- being and GPA in high school. I find substantial heterogeneity in treatment effects. Students who interact with better peers and receive early grades suffer more severe grade distortions, but exhibit stronger positive performance spillovers, better sort into non-compulsory education, and attain more education with respect to students lacking early grades. Negative peer effects in self-concept and grades are concentrated among disadvantaged students, who also receive lower parental support when exposed to better peers. This paper shows that class composition can distort students’ grades, self-concept and choices, and highlights the limits of assessing peer effects on test scores alone.

Rethinking Education Choices: The Effect of Surveys (joint with Juanna Schrøter Joensen and Greg Francisco Veramendi) [pdf (latest draft)]

Can surveys affect human capital investments? This paper examines whether individual education choices and outcomes are affected by a survey posing questions related to investments, performance, preferences, and expectations. We have administrative data for the whole Swedish population to which an extensive education survey was administered to randomly drawn samples of primary school students and their parents. This constitutes a large-scale randomized social experiment for testing whether responding to survey questions alters behavior. We observe complete education and labor market histories until the individuals are 31-36 years old. The causal effect of the survey on both short- and long-term outcomes is generally not significantly different from zero. We find, however, that being surveyed affects educational attainment, earnings, and employment in the early career for some subgroups. We assess heterogeneity in estimated causal effects and sibling spillovers in order to get at potential mechanisms. The patterns are consistent with the importance of increased awareness (or salience) and short-lived information “nudges”.

WORK IN PROGRESS

Comparing the effectiveness of automated and instructor-based feedback: A field experiment in higher education

First-year college students from a selective Asian university, surveyed and quizzed throughout an Introductory Economics course, were randomly assigned to one of three groups before their midterms. Simulation-based methods were used to ensure ex-ante balance between the three groups along all relevant observables, including course performance. Both treatment groups received feedback in an email sent by the instructor, including suggestions for improvement and encouragement. The first treatment group received standardized feedback based on grade performance bands, an automated task which required no effort from the instructor. The second treatment group received instead personalized feedback, prepared by the instructor after revising each midterm paper. The control group received no feedback after mid-term. Preliminary results show that any feedback provision raised final exam score and final course score respectively by 20% and 13.5% sd. While effects for personalized feedback are slightly larger than those for automated feedback, the difference is not significant. These results, at odds with the negative results consistently found in the literature on automated feedback provision in higher education, suggest that embedding technology into standard teaching practices might be more effective than relying on explicitly automated feedback systems.

The Effects of Children Television: Evidence from the Italian Transition to Digital TV

When Italy transitioned from analog to Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT), several children-specific channels became freely available to the whole population, marking the start of public Children Television. In this paper I study how exposure to the new television regime affected students’ educational achievement, non-cognitive skills and behavior. To identify the reduced-form effects of exposure and differential exposure to Children TV, I exploit the staggered implementation of the DTT reform, carried out from 2008 to 2012, in a difference-in-difference analysis. My data includes administrative school information, standardized test scores and survey responses for the universe of Italian students attending compulsory school from 2010 to 2017. Preliminary results show that exposure to Children TV does not affect educational performance, school motivation or preferences for education of students of any grade. Students exposed to Children Television instead experience a reduction in physical bullying in elementary school, possibly explained by lower exposure to violence in general TV. Future work will explore heterogeneity in the treatment effect and exploit commercial TV data to investigate how TV consumption patterns change for children and thus estimate actual treatment effects.

Understanding Policy Take-up: Evidence from Singapore

A growing body of evidence suggests that individuals lacking information about gov- ernment policies fail to take up the benefits they are eligible for. This project studies policy literacy and take-up among mature segments of the population, for whom we have still scarce evidence, in Singapore. The City state offers an interesting setup for two reasons. First, welfare programs were recently introduced or expanded. Second, features found in the literature to increase take-up (self-enrollment, outreach via SMS, targeted ads, etc.) were implemented at scale. The study is based on a representative sample of mature citizens, followed-up monthly since 2015, when they enrolled in the internet-based Singapore Life Panel (SLP) study. About 4000 eligible respondents took up in April 2019 an additional survey module investigating health policy take-up and literacy. The survey focused on two policies, randomly assigned within the set of policies participants were eligible for: an application-based policy and a self-enrolled policy, assigned in random order. Survey respondents assessed familiarity, information received, degree of support and knowledge in different domains for each policy. This information allows to descriptively investigate the determinants of policy take-up and literacy, and, exploiting the diadic setup, the role of self-enrollment. After the self-assessment part, participants took a quiz testing actual knowledge of the policy and eliciting their beliefs about generosity of government programs. Half respondents were randomly revealed quiz scores and correct answers. The information experiments allow to causally identify for each policy the effect of information provision and nudging on take-up and utilization and, independently of the policy assigned, whether test-taking and/or information provision affect beliefs about policy literacy and government generosity, and whether individuals with different priors about government generosity change their consumption and health services utilization consistently with belief updating.