I study a reform that shifts public lunchtime childcare in kindergartens and schools from an opt-in to an opt-out default. With the new default, children are automatically enrolled in low-cost lunchtime childcare unless parents opt out. Leveraging the staggered rollout in Zurich, Switzerland, in an event-study design, I document that the reform increases public childcare enrollment by 39%. The reform increases the employment rate of mothers with children in kindergarten by 4.8% and their earnings by 7.5%. I provide suggestive evidence that the reform reduces norm-related behavioral frictions by making public lunchtime childcare the initial arrangement for all families.

I study role model interventions that expose high school students to talks by STEM professionals during single-day school events. Combining data on more than 1,500 speakers with administrative records on 240,000 Swiss high school graduates, I find that exposure in the final year of high school increases STEM college enrollment by 4.1% and STEM degree completion by 7.7%. Events with a higher share of female speakers have larger effects for both female and male students. Presentation style explains part of these effects: female speakers are more likely to use interactive formats, to which students respond positively. Accounting for interactivity reduces the female-speaker effect by 37%.

Fathers provide less childcare than mothers. This project exploits Switzerland’s 2017 child-support reform, which increased the financial rewards for fathers who take on more than 30% of parental childcare following divorce. Using administrative data covering the universe of divorcing couples in Switzerland between 2012 and 2024, the project estimates the reform’s effects on childcare arrangements and examines the resulting consequences for mothers, fathers, and their children.

Foreign-born children often attend schools with higher concentrations of other immigrant children. We study the effects of a school-development program called QUIMS (quality in multicultural schools) in Zurich, Switzerland, targeted at schools with a share of immigrant children above 40%. Program schools receive the public QUIMS program label and support to improve teaching practices. We use linked administrative data between 1999-2025 and exploit the 40% cutoff to study the long-run effects of the program on immigrant and non-immigrant students. 

Do better-qualified minority jobseekers face less discrimination? We leverage large-scale clickstream data from a major online recruitment platform to investigate how discrimination varies with jobseekers’ human capital. The data allow us to track recruiters’ search behavior and observe the same information about jobseekers as recruiters do. We use detailed information on jobseekers’ qualifications to estimate their returns and assess how minority jobseekers would fare if their qualifications were valued in the same way as those of majority jobseekers. Comparing these actual and counterfactual returns allows us to characterize discrimination across the human capital distribution.

Can mentoring by female STEM professionals encourage young women to pursue STEM in college? Collaborating with the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences, this ongoing work investigates the impact of a seven-month mentoring program that pairs female students with female STEM professionals. Exploiting oversubscription, I randomize access to the program and assess its impact on students’ college educational choices, tracked through administrative data. Two cohorts of a total of 460 students completed the baseline survey and were randomized into the program in June 2024 and 2026, respectively.