Can sustained exposure to females persistently modernize gender attitudes? I study the impact of female peers and teachers on gender roles, perceived relative gender ability, and gender-related behaviors up to nine years later. For this, I exploit exogenous allocation to peers and teachers for a close-to-nationally-representative sample of Vietnamese primary schoolers. I find evidence that being exposed to a higher proportion of female peers decreases traditionalism both for males and females, and that this translates into actual behavior. Females increase their probability of enrolling at university and in male-dominated majors. This is mediated by increased academic aspirations, higher expected returns to education, and less traditional views on the acceptable life goals for females. Males increase both the intensive and extensive margins of home production. These results suggest that early exposure to females is capable of shifting slow-moving attitudes even in contexts of high overall cross-gender interactions. This finding is in stark contrast to the null impact that one year of education has on gender norms as estimated through an RDD exploiting laws of compulsory age of enrollment. 

May internally-evaluated standardized tests - a widespread tool for school accountability and a crucial input in parental school choice and university admissions, have the potential to distort individual decisions and increase inequality in access to resources? I exploit random assignment to external/internal evaluation across the universe of schools in the Spanish region of Madrid to provide novel evidence that the lower average scores attained by externally-evaluated schools is driven by private ones, whose performance falls by a third of a standard deviation relative to public schools. This difference persists after accounting for heterogeneous behavioral responses of students based on soft-skills and gender, which suggests that relying on internally-graded standardized exams for comparing students from different schools may suffer from equality issues when incentives for manipulation are not uniformly distributed across school types.

We evaluate a reading intervention involving 600 third-grade students in Chilean schools catering to disadvantaged populations. The intervention features an adaptive computer game designed to identify and improve weaknesses in literacy and cognitive skills, and is complemented by a mobile library and advice to parents to increase student's interest and parental involvement. We first quantify the impact on non-cognitive skills and academic perceptions. We find that, after just three months of intervention, treated students are 20-30 percent of a standard deviation more likely to believe that their performance is better than that of their peers, to like school, to have stronger grit, and to have a more internal locus-of-control. Gains in aspirations and self-confidence are particularly large for students that we identify as at-risk-of-dyslexia. These improvements are reflected in better performance on a nation-wide, standardized language test. Our results show that non-cognitive skills, particularly of at-risk-of-dyslexia students, can be changed through a short, light-touch, and cost-effective education technology intervention.

There is increasing evidence in favor of non-unitary models of the household. Moreover, gender norms and values have been shown to be transmitted across generations and to affect intra-household allocations. I lever a unique dataset from China containing each spouse’s contributions to income, market, and home hours of parents and children (after forming their own household) to uncover a strong positive correlation between the female spouse’s relative contributions across two generations in the absence of reverse causality. This is robust to the inclusion of a rich vector of controls and provincial fixed effects. Exploiting large exogenous changes in education brought along by the Chinese 1986 Compulsory Education Law I find that the degree of intergenerational transmission was disrupted by the reform, and that this happened heterogeneously across groups with different parental relative contributions. I further show that this was driven by a change in the attitudes towards gender norms, which suggests that transmission occurs at least partly through socialization and that policies can have a multiplier effect both within and across generations.

Using a mix of household- and employer-based survey data from 46 countries, we provide novel evidence that workers in larger firms perform more non-routine analytical and routine cognitive tasks, even within narrowly defined occupations. Moreover, workers in larger firms rely more on the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to perform these tasks. We also document a 10--20% wage premium that workers in larger firms enjoy relative to their counterparts in smaller firms. A mediation analysis shows that our novel empirical facts on the task content of jobs are able to explain over 10% of the large firm wage premium, a similar fraction to what can be explained by selection of workers on education, gender, and age.

What drives long-term mental health and its intergenerational correlation? Exploiting variation in unemployment rates upon labor market entry across Australian states and cohorts, we provide novel evidence of persistent effects on mental health two decades after labor market entry. We find that individuals exposed to a one percentage point higher unemployment rate at labor market entry relative to trend have 14% of a standard deviation worse mental health at ages 36–40. We further document an intergenerational impact of labor market entry conditions. Along the extensive margin, females more impacted by labor market entry conditions in terms of mental health increase completed fertility. Along the intensive margin, daughters whose parents experienced a one percentage point higher unemployment rate at entry have 18% of a standard deviation worse mental health during adolescence. Sons’ mental health is not impacted.

Economic development in authoritarian regimes is often accompanied by large rises in inequality. An empirical pattern suggests that the consolidation of these systems is partly based on the strong support for inequality among the poor, despite typically being the segment that loses out the most during the transition. I am the first to empirically provide a causal rationalization of this fact. My focus is on China, the largest authoritarian regime and a country with rapidly increasing inequalities. I exploit exogenous variation in education provided by the staggered implementation of a major reform, the 1986 Compulsory Education Law, to show that education causally increases long-run preferences for redistribution and institutional skepticism. Combining the reform with within-household variation arising from information on all siblings' occupations I show that education also causes occupational improvements, which explains the pattern in the puzzle. Exploring the channels suggests that this change in preferences is likely driven by fairness concerns towards the most disfavored segments. Finally, taking advantage of the unique opportunity to observe the policy preferences of the children of the affected-by-the-reform individuals I provide novel evidence that the attitudinal effects of policy are transmitted across generations.

Differences in academic achievement across Indian castes are both large and persistent. I make use of rich individual data to explore how classroom caste composition affects academic progress as well as the mechanisms at work. Exploiting exogenous assignment of students to classes and teachers I find that a one-percentage point increase in the proportion of low-caste classmates leads to a fall of around 2% of a standard deviation in the mathematics score and to much smaller effects in English. This phenomenon is mediated through lower effort exerted by the students, which itself stems from the students’ worsened perception about the extent to which their teachers value them. This non-cognitive channel, which has not been previously identified in the peer effects literature, suggests that the use of a fairly malleable input such as more open and receptive teachers with regards to low-caste students would be an appropriate policy.