WORKING PAPERS
I develop and estimate a model of endogenous teacher effectiveness, where both teachers and students exert effort to produce knowledge. I use rich data to estimate the model and recover flexible distributions of students' endowments, teachers' general teaching skills, and teachers’ marginal effort costs. In counterfactual analyses, I quantify the achievement gains from various teacher-to-classroom reassignment interventions. I find that these interventions can improve average student achievement and that ignoring endogenous effort adjustments can distort the distribution of gains. Additionally, I find that standard value-added specifications nested within the model have limitations in identifying effective teachers for low-performing classrooms.
Mental Health and the Early Career Dynamics of Young Men. With Cecilia Diaz-Campo, Bart Hamilton, and Hyun Soo Suh.
Do poor mental and physical health scar early career labor market trajectories? Using longitudinal data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA), we document the life-cycle patterns and analyze the two-way interactions between health and labor market outcomes. To address health endogeneity, we exploit exogenous life shocks as transitory shocks to identify their negative short-term effects on health. Informed by this evidence, we develop and estimate a dynamic discrete choice model with unobserved heterogeneity, allowing for correlation between health and income. Our estimates show that poor health, especially mental health, significantly reduces the likelihood of full-time employment and raises the probability of not working relative to part-time work. A strong scarring effect of mental health shocks emerges, leading to persistently weaker recovery paths and lower earnings. Our counterfactuals highlight three findings: (i) permanent health and income types jointly drive large inequality, with low types earning half as much as high types; (ii) persistent poor mental health contributes to higher earnings inequality than physical health; and (iii) transitory health and labor market shocks have long-term negative effects on labor supply choices, amplified with poor mental health.
Grades, Effort, and Incentives: Modeling Student Performance within a Semester.
I develop and estimate a dynamic model of students’ academic performance and learning effort within a semester to examine how course design affects academic outcomes. The model is estimated using rich data from an Introduction to Economics course at a leading public university in Argentina, covering 2018–2025. In counterfactual exercises, I study how changes in the minimum grade required to pass the course and changes in the relative weights assigned to midterms affect students’ academic performance. Student heterogeneity is captured through latent types that differ in productivity, effort costs, knowledge persistence, and valuation of final grades. By simulating alternative grading schemes, the analysis shows how intra-semester policies can reduce achievement gaps by increasing the participation of students with low productivity but a high valuation for passing the course.
WORK IN PROGRESS
Group or Individual Teacher Bonuses? An Estimation of the Potential Gains
This paper studies how different teacher performance pay schemes would perform if optimally designed. I use publicly available data from a teacher incentive experiment in Andhra Pradesh, India, which included both individual and group piece-rate bonuses. First, I recover production and utility parameters from the control and individual-incentive treatment. I then simulate the group-incentive game to infer the likelihood that teachers play a free-riding outcome versus a cooperative (first-best) outcome. With these estimates, I evaluate counterfactual incentive structures to compare the potential gains from individual- and group-based schemes.