Research

Utilizing the quasi-random allocation of the Transmigration Program in Indonesia and the variation in productivity among transmigrant villages, I show that cities proximate to more productive villages experience higher population and employment growth, with growth primarily observed in the service industries. The higher growth rates are observed concurrently with higher in-migration to cities, with migrants coming from other both rural and urban districts, which is not driven by transmigrants abandoning their destination villages. As migrants are likely to stay in more productive villages, it provides suggestive evidence for positive indirect spillover effects of rural productivity on regional urban markets.

This paper investigates the role of beliefs and stigma in shaping students’ use of professional mental health services at a large private university in Mexico, where supply-side barriers are minimal and services are readily accessible. In a survey experiment with 680 students, we find that nearly 50% of students in distress do not receive professional mental health support despite a high level of awareness and perceived effectiveness, constituting a substantial treatment gap. We document stigmatized beliefs and misconceptions correlated with the treatment gap. As three-quarters of students incorrectly believe that those in distress perform worse academically and that the majority of students going to therapy are in severe distress, we implement an information intervention to correct these beliefs. We find that it increases students’ sharing of on-campus mental health resources with peers and encourages them to recommend these resources when advising a friend in distress. Interestingly, we find that it lowers respondents’ willingness to pay for private therapy at the end of the intervention. Yet, this effect does not translate into a long-run reduction in self-reported therapy use 6 months after the experiment, with prior therapy users showing increased off-campus take-up.

In this project, we design and test a novel intervention on a tutoring platform – providing tutor training with a focus on peer group discussions. We aim to recruit around 8,000 school kids to attend math tutoring sessions led by around 2,000 university student volunteer tutors who are working to complete their social service requirement. The tutor training program is designed to not only improve tutor teaching skills and children’s academic outcomes, but create a sense of community among tutors and facilitate the development of holistic soft skills and increase overall wellbeing, which we conjecture will have downstream effects on the wellbeing of children participating in the tutoring sessions. By implementing two branches of treatment: Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) skills module with and without peer group discussions, we are able to isolate the importance of peer connections for improving teaching, self-confidence, and communication skills among tutors, which will have implications for further tutor training program design across tutoring programs in LMIC. Our pilot results indicate that students assigned to tutors who participated in peer-group discussions show larger gains in endline math scores relative to both those whose tutors completed training individually and those tutors without SEL training. Additionally, tutors who completed training in peer groups feel more connected to other tutors on the platform and report that they have felt more supported throughout the tutoring experience at the end of the term.