Research

WORKING PAPERS

The The Impact of a Peer-to-Peer Mentoring Program on University Choices and Performance (with Stefania Bortolotti) 

We study the impact of a personalized mentoring program on university enrollment choices and academic outcomes. Conducting a randomized controlled trial among 337 high school students, we find that the program significantly influences students' decisions, increasing the likelihood of choosing a field aligned with their mentor's by 22 percentage points, representing a 45% increase from the baseline. Notably, the program also shifts preferences towards STEM/Economics fields, enhancing prospective wages by 3.1-3.7%, without negatively impacting university performance. These findings underscore the mentorship's potential to guide students towards more informed and beneficial educational choices.

School Quality Beyond Test Scores: the Role of Schools in Shaping Educational Outcomes

I study how schools impact student performance and educational attainment throughout secondary education, and show that school quality cannot be easily captured by any type of rankings because students with differing characteristics and abilities benefit from different school inputs. To do so, I estimate a dynamic structural model of cognitive skills accumulation and schooling decision using rich administrative data from middle schools in Barcelona. I then simulate the outcomes that each student would have achieved in every school in the sample. Notably, the school environment has a crucial impact on the educational attainment of students from less advantaged family background and low-ability students who are at greater risk of leaving school. Moreover, the schools that would yield the highest final test scores for these students - provided they do not drop out - are not the ones that would maximize their likelihood of graduating and enrolling in further education. The results suggest that evaluating and comparing schools using only standardized assessments is insufficient for serving the needs of disadvantaged students, who require schools that enhance educational attainment rather than just test scores.

SELECTED WORKS IN PROGRESS (field trials)

Reducing the digital divide for marginalized households (with Guglielmo Barone e Denni Tommasi). RCT involving approximately 900 participants in Turin (Italy); implemented and financed by Fondazione Ufficio Pio della Compagnia di San Paolo (project "DigitAll"). Design started in May 2023, baseline survey collected in October 2023, field implementation in progress.  AEA RCT registry: 0012259

The impact of mentoring on tertiary education expectations (with Caterina Calsamiglia and Javier Garcia-Brazales). RCT involving students in 57 high schools in Catalonia; implemented through Fundesplai and financed by NextGenerationEU (project "Hedera", second wave).Design started in July 2023, baseline survey collected in September 2023, endline survey collected in January 2024, data analysis and collection of administrative data in progress.  AEA RCT Registry: 0012319 

The impact of professional and volunteer mentoring on university access and retention (with Caterina Calsamiglia). RCT involving 200 high schools in Catalonia and Andalusia; implemented through Fundesplai and financed by NextGenerationEU (project "Hedera", first wave). Design started in March 2022, field implementation completed, end-line survey collection in progress. AEA RCT Registry: 0010785

PUBLICATIONS

Tailoring Mentorship: Evidence on Diverse Needs and Application Patterns for High School Students (with Caterina Calsamiglia and Javier Garcia-Brazales) AEA Papers and Proceedings, 114: 1–6, Forthcoming May 2024

What is at stake without high stake exams? Students' evaluation and admission to college at the time of COVID-19 (with Andreu Arenas and Caterina Calsamiglia) Economics of Education Review, Volume 83, August 2021

The outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 inhibited face-to-face education and constrained exam taking. In many countries worldwide, high-stakes exams happening at the end of the school year determine college admissions.  This paper investigates the impact of using historical data of school and high-stakes exams results to train a model to predict high-stakes exams given the available data in the Spring. The most transparent and accurate model turns out to be a linear regression model with high school GPA as the main predictor. Further analysis of the predictions reflect how high-stakes exams relate to GPA in high school for different subgroups in the population. Predicted scores slightly advantage females and low SES individuals, who perform relatively worse in high-stakes exams than in high school. Our preferred model accounts for about 50% of the out-of-sample variation in the high-stakes exam. On average, the student rank using predicted scores differs from the actual rank by almost 17 percentiles. This  suggests that either high-stakes exams capture individual skills that are not measured by high school grades or that high-stakes exams are a noisy measure of the same skill.

Grading on a Curve: When Having Good Peers is Not Good (with Caterina Calsamiglia) Economics of Education Review, Volume 73,  December 2019 

Student access to education levels, tracks or majors is usually determined by their previous performance, measured either by internal exams, designed and graded by teachers in school, or external exams, designed and graded by central authorities.  We say teachers grade on a curve whenever having better peers harms the evaluation obtained by a given student.  We use rich administrative records from public schools in Catalonia to provide evidence that teachers indeed grade on a curve, leading to negative peer effects. This puts forth a source of distortion that may arise in any system that uses internal grades to compare students across schools and classes.  We find suggestive evidence that school choice is impacted only the year when internal grades matter for future prospects.

Maturity and School Outcomes in an Inflexible System: Evidence from Catalonia (with Caterina Calsamiglia) SERIEs— Journal of the Spanish Economic Association (2020) 11:1–49 

The existence of a rigid cut-off date which determines when children start primary school creates a large heterogeneity in students' level of maturity within the classroom. We use rich administrative data of the universe of public schools in Catalonia to show that: 1) Relatively younger children do significantly worse both in tests administered at the school level and at the regional level, and they experience greater retention. 2) These effects are homogeneous across SES and significant across the whole distribution of performance. 3) Younger children in our data exhibit higher dropout rates and choose the academic track in secondary school less often. 4) Younger children are more frequently diagnosed with learning disorders.

Misperceptions of unemployment and individual labor market outcomes (with Ana Rute Cardoso and Lavinia Piemontese) IZA Journal of Labor Policy (2016) 5:13

We analyze the impact of misperceptions of the unemployment rate on individual wages, using the European Social Survey. We follow a threefold strategy to tackle potential endogeneity problems, as the model includes the following: controls for worker’s ability, the regional unemployment rate, and country fixed effects. We estimate interval regression models. When subjective perceptions overstate the country unemployment rate, a one percentage point gap between the perceived and the actual rates reduces wages by 0.4 to 0.7 %. We discuss a potential mechanism. A pessimistic view of the labor market leads to concern over own employment prospects, lowering perceived bargaining power and reservation wages.

POLICY REPORTS

La heterogeneidad madurativa en el aula y los posibles costes de un sistema inflexible (with Caterina Calsamiglia) Revista Indice June 2015