Research

Works in Progress 

From Children’s Words to Social Measures: AI, Aspirations and the Future of Mixed-Methods Social Research, with Kartika Bhatia, Irina Merkurieva and Rosemary Ridgway

The Gender Gap in STEM Majors: the (Un)-Importance of Life Goals, with Jamin Speer 

Team Diversity and Output in Non-Routine Creative Tasks, with Raphael Brade and Lavinia Kinne

Impact of performance feedback on student study habits and grades, with Lavinia Kinne

Selection into College Major, with Jamin Speer 

Working papers & drafts 

Parenting practices and child development: evidence from a caregiver training programme in Tanzania

with Anitha Martine, Julius Massaga, Emmanuel Bunzari (New draft 2026); formerly EdWorkingPaper: 24-996. Submitted. 

We study the evolution of programme effects in a caregiver-focused early-childhood intervention in rural Tanzania, following 2,289 children and their caregivers from infancy to age four. At age two, programme assignment was associated with a 0.55 SD increase in a parenting index and a 0.35 SD increase in caregiver-reported child development. By age four, the estimated effect on parenting remained large  (0.44 SD), while the effect on child development was smaller and not statistically distinguishable from zero. The findings highlight that persistent programme effects on inputs into child development need not translate into equally persistent changes in child development itself.

Childhood Aspirations and Adult Outcomes

with Irina Merkurieva (Dec 2025), Department of Economics Discussion Paper No. 2505

This paper extracts aspirations from texts written in childhood by members of a British longitudinal cohort, and explores how these relate to later life outcomes. Applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to short essays collected at age 11, we identify four aspiration themes: family, hobbies, financial success, and career. The weight of these four themes varies substantially across respondents, with girls on average placing more weight on family, and boys on financial success. Aspirations extracted using our method are strongly predictive of later life outcomes, even when controlling for detailed measures of early life environment, ability, and family background. These associations are often highly heterogenous by gender; for example, family-related aspirations are associated with higher educational attainment for men, but lower educational attainment for women. 

How to Make Decentralization Work? Evidence from a capacity-building intervention in local governance

with Kartika Bhatia (Nov 2022), reject & resubmit Journal of Development Studies

In recent decades many countries have sought to decentralize the provision of public goods and services, and to some extent also the collection of government revenues. While local governments usually have more information on local needs, they typically have less capacity than higher-level governments and may be prone to elite capture. In this paper we evaluate the impact of a capacity-building training for Panchayat (village) staff in rural India to build skills for the Gram Panchayat Development Plan, a formal planning document drawn up on an annual basis. We do not find that the intervention affected the amount of funds requested in these plans; however, we find some evidence of a shift in focus towards social sector expenditure.

The Major Decision: Labor Market Implications of the Timing Of Specialization in College 

with Luc Bridet and Richard Murphy, R&R Labour Economics

College students in the United States choose their major much later than their counterparts in Europe. In this paper we estimate the benefits of flexible specialization: specifically, whether additional years of multi-disciplinary education help students make a better choice of specialization, and at what cost in foregone specialized skills. We first document that students who choose their major later are more likely to change fields on the labor market. We then build and estimate a dynamic model of college education where the optimal timing of specialization reflects a tradeoff between discovering comparative advantage and acquiring occupation-specific skills. Estimates suggest that delaying specialization is informative, although noisy. Working in the field of comparative advantage accounts for up to 20% of a well-matched worker’s earnings. While education is transferable across fields with only a 10% penalty, workers who wish to change fields incur a large, one-time cost. We use these estimates to compare the current system to one which imposes specialization at college entry. In this counterfactual the number of workers who switch fields drops from 24% to 20%; however, comparative advantage-occupation mismatch rises from 23% to 30%, resulting in an overall expected welfare reduction of approximately 1.5% of earnings.

Publications 

Driven to Achieve: 40 Years of Evidence on College Students’ Skills and Aspirations, Leighton M. &  J. D. Speer.  Applied Economics Letters (accepted). Working paper version.

College Major Choice, Leighton M. &  J. D. Speer. Chapter in S. Bradley & C. Green (Eds) 3rd Edition of the Economics of Education: A Comprehensive Overview. (Forthcoming)

Family Background and College Major Choice: Evidence on Major Earnings Growth, Leighton M. &  J. D. Speer. Education Finance and Policy (2026) 21 (1): 121–145. Working paper version.

Teachers on the Move: Evidence from a Large-Scale Learning Intervention during Lockdown, Bhatia, K & M Leighton. April 2024. Journal of Development Studies. Vol. 60, No. 7, pp. 1002–1020. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2024.2337381 

Fostering Early Childhood Development in Low-Resource Communities: Evidence from a Group-Based Parenting Intervention in Tanzania, Leighton, M, A Martine & J Massaga. October 2023. World Development. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2023.106335

Major-Occupation Match Quality: An Empirical Measure Based on Relative Productivity, Leighton, M. & J. D. Speer.  2023. The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy. Vol 23, no. 1, pp. 285-292. https://doi.org/10.1515/bejeap-2022-0254

Mother Tongue Reading Materials as a Bridge to Literacy,  Leighton, M. December 2022. Economics of Education Review. Volume 91 (102312). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2022.102312 

Labor Market Returns to College Major Specificity, Leighton, M. & J. D. Speer. September 2020. European Economic Review. Vol 128 (103489). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2020.103489

• Video summary by Jurin Katayama Flores for the St Andrews Economist

Unpaid work and access to science professions, Fournier, A. M. V., Holford, A. J., Bond, A. L. & Leighton, M. A. 19 Jun 2019. PLoS ONE. 14, 6, 16 p., e0217032. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217032

• • "A Bad Deal for Early-Career Researchers" American Scientist (Nov/Dec 2019)

  • "Experience versus salary" Science (11 oct 2019) 

Social promotion in primary school: effects on grade progression, Leighton, M. A., Souza, P. & Straub, S., 30 Jun 2019. Brazilian Review of Econometrics. 39, 1, p. 1-33. http://dx.doi.org/10.12660/bre.v39n12019.78513

Reports

Bangladesh Children's Book Initiative End Line Report. 2019. M Leighton & K Mucyo. Save the Children.