RESEARCH
RESEARCH
"Interruption of studies and vulnerability" (with Vanessa Rojas, Santiago Cueto, and Alan Sanchez). December, 2024. GRADE. Documentos de Investigación, 129.
"Effects of program ALIADOS on diversification and associativity in rural communities (in spanish). May, 2015. Chapter 3 of book “IV Agriculture Census: Researches, experience and learning”. National Permanent Seminar of Agriculture Research (SEPIA).
"Long-term impact & persistency of a secondary-level Extended School-Day Reform in Peru" (with Marta Favara and Alan Sanchez)
Extended school-day programmes have proven to be very effective in the short-term, but there is still little evidence about its effects in the long-term. In addition, few studies analyze the sustainability of school reforms, i.e., whether impacts persist for new cohorts that enter the education system. We estimate the long-term effects and sustainability of a comprehensive secondary-level public school reform called Jornada Escolar program (JEC) in Peru, which combines an extended-school day component with improvements in IT infrastructure, staff, and pedagogy. The fact that the reform was staggered and had clear eligibility rules allows us to use a regression discontinuity design and a heterogenous difference-in-difference approach to measure its impacts. We track more than 900,000 students between 2015-2023 and find that JEC increases the probability of being enrolled in university education and improves access to the labor market but does not affect wages. The effects are partially explained by improvements in school inputs and by changes in higher education aspirations, specifically, a substitution effect between preferences for university and technical education. We also find sustained effects of JEC on test scores for new cohorts of students and schools that joined JEC after 2015. These results hold even seven years after the program began.
“Is feedback always positive? Experimental evidence from public schools in Peru” (with Maria Rodrigues). 2024.
This study evaluates the impact of providing a report card to principals with information about their own and theirs teachers performance. The experiment was carried out in a sample of 308 public secondary schools (188 urban and 120 rural schools) in Peru, half of which were randomly selected to receive a school report card. Results show slightly positive effects on reading comprehension test scores in urban schools (approximately 0.06 σ), but an unexpected negative effects on reading comprehension and science test scores in rural schools (between -0.10 σ and -0.16 σ). When exploring potential mechanisms, we found that report card didn’t improve principals performance, and only reduce optimal use of school time in rural school (approximately -0.60 σ). On the hand, report card improved teacher performance but only for teachers visited in the baseline and mainly in rural school (between 0.25 σ and 0.55 σ). We interpret it as a substitution effect between time and effort dedicated to monitoring teachers’ practices and effective school hours, due to limited resources and management capacity in rural schools, which leads to an unexpected learning loss in students.
“The long-term effects of civil conflict on cognitive and non-cognitive skills: Evidence from Peru”. 2017.
The paper exploits province level variation in the timing and intensive of civil conflict between 1980 and 2000 to study effect of political violence on cognitive and non-cognitive. The data comes from a novel household develops by World Bank (2010) that includes special tests to measure cognitive and non-cognitive skills. On the one hand, verbal fluency (-0.17 σ), working memory (-0.19 σ) and math problem solving (-0.15 σ) are affected negatively in pre-school years (3-5 years old). On the other hand, exposure of political violence has negative effects on emotional stability when the exposure to civil conflict was in early childhood (1-2 years old) using Goldberg Test. These results are consistent with the literature of early childhood development which indicates that non-cognitive skills are more malleable during the lifecycle compared to cognitive skills, which is developed in the early years of life. An important contribution is that these results could help to understand better the channel of effects of civil war on education and labor outcomes.
“Long run evidence from a coaching program in Peru ” (with Stephanie Majerowicz).
"School Starting Age and Academic Progression" (with Pia Basurto and Jesús Gutierrez)
“How to predict teacher sorting using machine learning techniques: Evidence from centralized teacher school choice.” (with Jesús Gutierrez and Gabriel Wallin).