"Gender differences in grading: teacher's bias or student behaviour?" Education Economics, 2024.
"Let's stay together: the effects of repeated student-teacher matches on academic achievement" with Facundo Albornoz and Richard Upward. Economics of Education Review, 2023.
Discussion: Universidad Torcuato Di Tella blog, Tes Magazine (by Alex Quigley) , Observatorio de la Escuela en Iberoamérica (by Ismael Sanz Labrador)
Working papers
"Long-term effects of human capital spillovers within families'' with Facundo Albornoz, Antonio Cabrales and Richard Upward [Draft] Revision requested.
We provide new evidence on the long-term effects of human capital externalities within families. Using comprehensive national administrative data for Chile, covering 15 cohorts of school-leavers, we show that initial differences in human capital of one child affect the educational outcomes of their siblings at age 18. To identify these effects we exploit exogenous variation in school starting age caused by school entry cutoff dates. We do this for both older-to-younger and younger-to-older sibling pairs, which allows us to shed light on the relative importance of sibling interactions and parental investment as mechanisms for sibling spillovers. We show that the spillover varies in ways which can be explained by a model of parental investment in which parents compensate for initial differences in human capital and place a higher weight on the human capital of their older child. We also provide direct evidence that initial differences in human capital shift parental investment in the predicted direction.
"Cognitive and non-cognitive effects of nursery care in the medium run under unobserved heterogeneity'' with Rafael Sánchez. [Draft]
Unlike the previous literature which focuses on the short run cognitive effects of attending childcare (3-5 years old), we estimate the medium run cognitive and non-cognitive effects of nursery care (0-2 years old) considering not only observed but also unobserved heterogeneity. We constructed a panel dataset with national coverage from different administrative sources. Our results suggest positive selection for Language, Mathematics, Motivation and Self-Esteem, implying that babies and toddlers who are more likely (for unobserved reasons) to attend nursery care have a higher treatment effect. We also find heterogeneous effects in a way that further expansions of public nursery care centers that successfully attract babies and toddlers with high resistance and not currently enrolled in nursery care may yield low returns. This calls into question childcare policies at very early stages especially when there is poor quality involved.
Work in Progress
"The younger brother effect: how siblings shape education success" with Richard Upward.
"Grading standards, student achievement and parental investments".
"Teacher specialisation, teacher familiarity and student achievement".
Other Publications/ Policy Papers
"Liderazgo Escolar en Chile: Una mirada a las prácticas directivas" (2017). Serie Evidencias N° 34, Centro de Estudios, Ministerio de Educación de Chile. (Spanish) [Link]
"Índice de Infraestructura Básica Comunal: Metodología, Caracterización y Estimación de Brechas de Infraestructura" (2014). Documento de Trabajo N° 79, Gerencia de Estudios, Cámara Chilena de la Construcción. (Spanish) [Link]
"Paraguay: Estimation of the Structural Fiscal Balance and Fiscal Rule Proposal" with Guillermo Le Fort and Gonzalo Escobar (2013). Volume 2, Paraguay Public Expenditure Review, The World Bank, Washington D.C. [Link]