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Publications
Publications
“Reinforcing the STEM Pipeline in Vocational-Technical High Schools: The Effect of Female Teachers.”, with Sevilla, María Paola and Paola Bordon. Economics of Education Review 95 (August 2023): 102428. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2023.102428.
Coverage: CNN Chile, El Mercurio
Free download: Accepted manuscript here
Working Papers
Working Papers
Gender Peer Effects in Post-Secondary Vocational Education
This paper presents evidence that women benefit from having a higher percentage of female peers in post-secondary vocational STEM programs. I use idiosyncratic variation in gender composition across cohorts within majors within branches (campuses) for identification. A 10 percentage point increase in the proportion of women in a STEM major cohort has a statistically significant positive effect on female students. It decreases female dropout rates by 9.6% and increases GPA by 0.05 standard deviations. The evidence suggests peer effects are mediated by the gender of the instructors: as female students have fewer female instructors, the effect of having more female peers intensifies.
Closing Gaps in Higher Education Trajectories: The Effect of Targeted Information and Mentorship (Working Paper)
(With Andres Barrios-Fernandez and Josefina Eluchans-Errazuriz)
Using a randomized controlled trial (RCT), this project aims to assess whether the provision of targeted information and mentoring to students attending vocational high schools affect the quantity and type of post-secondary studies they pursue and their higher education aspirations. The RCT randomly assigned 80 high schools to the control group, 80 high schools to an information-only treatment group, and 80 high schools to a combination of information and mentoring treatment group. The mentoring treatment is randomly assigned to only a few students per class, a feature that will allow us to study the spillovers of the mentoring program on the social network of treated individuals. With this last part of the experiment, we aim to understand to which extent social spillovers could be used to design more efficient and effective interventions to help students to make informed decisions about their post-secondary education trajectories.
Violence at Schools (Working paper)
(With Josefa Aguirre and Román Andrés Zarate)
This paper estimates the impact of violence perpetrated by peers and school staff on student victims. Leveraging unique administrative data from Chile that links reports of school violence to individual educational records, we address longstanding data limitations that have constrained empirical research on this issue. Using a matched difference-in-differences design, we find that exposure to school violence has persistent negative effects: absenteeism increases by 46–64%, grade retention rates double, and both grades and test scores decline significantly, with impacts lasting up to four years. In the longer term, victims are substantially less likely to graduate from high school or enroll in university, with violence perpetrated by adults having more severe consequences than peer violence. Complementary survey evidence reveals that reported incidents are associated with increased perceptions of violence and discrimination, as well as decreases in school belonging and teacher expectations. While these psychological and perceptual effects tend to fade after one year, the adverse educational consequences persist, underscoring how brief traumatic experiences can lead to long-lasting educational disadvantages.
Work in Progress
Work in Progress
Gender Confidence Differences and the College Major Gender Gap
Gender segregation on college major choice remains high, with adverse effects for women and possible inefficiencies in allocating students to majors where they have comparative advantages. A partial explanation of the college major gender gap is self-confidence biases in some areas of study. In this paper, I evaluate an intervention that informed outstanding students in STEM about their relative performance. The results show that women and men were affected differently by the intervention, and those good-performing women that are not at the top of the performance distribution increase their probability of applying to any major. The increase in application probability comes from an increase in health applications. Men in this group decrease their chances of applying to any major.
Textbook Gender Bias and Educational Gender Gap
This paper tests the hypothesis that a policy aimed at lowering gender bias in textbooks will reduce the achievement gap between boys and girls in math. Using a dataset that contains information for all students in 10 cohorts of the Chilean school system, I exploit the variation in implementation timing of a policy aimed to reduce textbook gender bias to identify its effects in the classroom gender gap, using reading and math standardized test scores. Using a difference-in-difference approach to estimate the effect, my results suggest that a policy aimed to lower textbook gender bias is associated with a decrease in the reading gender gap.
Do Cohort Peer Diversity Matters and For Whom? Evidence from Chile on Students’ Academic Outcomes
(With Francisco Lagos)
The effect of peers on short term human capital formation has been largely studied in the education literature. However, the evidence in this context is still mixed, depending on the definition and operationalization of peer effects. Using national longitudinal data from Chile, in this study, we aim to contribute to this literature by focusing on the effects of peer socioeconomic diversity (rather than peer average socioeconomic status) as a function of the student's own socioeconomic status. Preliminary results show that the effect of peers' diversity varies depending on the student's own socioeconomic status. Results suggest that more disadvantaged students benefit from having a socioeconomically diverse group of peers.
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