Parental Involvement Project: Group photo at the end of surveyors' training.
I grew up in a rural area without hospitals, electricity, or running water, and I am a first-gen to attend formal schooling. That background shapes the way I approach research—the questions I ask and the mechanisms I focus on. My work is grounded in real-world contexts, often motivated by patterns and frictions I have seen firsthand.
Activating Parental Managerial Capital: How Role Clarity Improves Education Outcomes--(Under Review)
Households, like firms, differ in transforming inputs into outcomes. This paper introduces parental managerial capital—the ability to organize children’s time, monitor effort, and sustain learning routines—as a productive input in human-capital accumulation. In Benin, I document an intention–implementation gap: most parents view monitoring attendance, enforcing lesson review, checking notebooks, and tracking progress as their responsibility, yet many do not implement them. I test whether relaxing managerial-capacity constraints improves outcomes through randomized phone coaching that provides a low-cost, literacy-independent managerial technology. The intervention narrows the intention–implementation gap and raises achievement: GPA increases by 0.11 SD, grade completion rises by 4 percentage points overall, and by 13 percentage points among at-risk students. Gains occur without increases in financial support or tutoring. Treated parents become more accurate about academic standing, suggesting household management generates information endogenously and identifying managerial capital as an overlooked source of educational inequality.
Women’s underrepresentation in STEM may reflect two barriers: low aspirations and failure to meet subject-specific performance thresholds. We study these barriers using a randomized experiment with Grade 7 and Grade 10 students in rural Benin. The experiment compares mixed-gender supplemental math classes taught by male teachers, girls-only classes taught by female teachers with light life-skills content, and a control group. Male tutoring raises girls’ math scores by 0.24 standard deviations, with gains in both grades. The female-teacher intervention does not improve math performance but increases Grade 7 girls’ STEM career aspirations and agency by 0.33 and 0.27 standard deviations, respectively. The results show that the two models affect different dimensions of STEM readiness and that stronger aspirations need not coincide with stronger math performance for girls.
Crisis-Induced Learning Losses and Recovery: Evidence from School Closures in Nigeria During COVID-19 (Joint with Adeniran, A., Okoye, D. and Wantchekon, L.) RISE Working Paper Series. 22/120.--(Under Review)
Millions of children worldwide are affected by school closures due to conflicts, disease outbreaks, and natural disasters, leading to learning losses and precarious future path for students in developing countries. There is an urgent need to provide possible policy options to get children back on track. This paper provides evidence from Nigerian schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, suggesting that a full recovery from crisis-induced learning losses is possible. Using data from a random sample of schools, we find significant learning losses of about .6 standard deviations in English and Math. However, a program designed to slow down the curriculum and cover what was missed during school closures led to a full recovery of all learning losses within 2 months. Having an educated mother and access to learning at-home helps to minimize learning losses and speed up recovery. Students who participated in the program do not lag behind one year later and remain in school.
Other Ongoing Projects
Close to Home: Cognitive Distance and the Productivity of Learning (with Leonard Wantchekon & Fatima Khan)--Data collection complete
Improving School Financing: The Role of Digitizing Tuition Fees Payment (with Leora Klapper and Owen Ozier)—Pilot Ongoing
Balancing the Scales: Gender Norms and Girls’ Educational Outcomes and Aspirations--Pilot Ongoing
Organizational Capacity as Human Capital--Pilot Ongoing
A New Perspective on Child Marriage in Developping Countries (with Abby Stocker)