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 was the first in my family to attend formal schooling. That background quietly 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)
Why do some households fail to translate educational investments into learning? This paper introduces parental managerial capital—the ability to organize children’s time, monitor effort, and sustain routines that support learning—as a productive input in human-capital accumulation. In Benin, I first document a large intention–implementation gap: most parents say that monitoring attendance, enforcing lesson review, and tracking progress are their responsibility, yet many do not implement the corresponding routines. I then test whether relaxing managerial-capacity constraints improves outcomes using a randomized phone-based coaching intervention that provides a simple, literacy-independent managerial technology. The intervention substantially narrows the intention–implementation gap and raises achievement: GPA increases by 0.11 standard deviations, and grade completion rises by 12 percentage points among students initially at risk of repetition. Although the program provides no grades or performance records, treated parents become more accurate about their child’s academic standing, suggesting that stronger household management generates information endogenously through monitoring and school contact. The findings identify household managerial capital as an important and an overlooked source of educational inequality.
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
When Role Models Are Not Enough: Girls-Only Classes, Female Teachers, and Performance in Mathematics (with Leonard Wantchekon): 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
A New Perspective on Child Marriage