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.
Do poor mental and physical health scar early-career labor market trajectories? Using longitudinal data from HILDA and exploiting adverse life events as plausibly exogenous health shocks, we document strong short-run deterioration in mental health following these events. Motivated by this evidence, we estimate a dynamic discrete choice model that jointly characterizes the evolution of mental and physical health and their two-way interactions with schooling and early-career labor market decisions. Poor mental health substantially lowers full-time employment, raises nonemployment, and generates persistent scarring that depresses earnings. Counterfactuals show that early-life mental health shocks are a major source of long-run inequality, with transitory shocks producing enduring scarring.
A Dynamic Model of Academic Performance: Grading Schemes and Student Achievement
I develop and estimate a dynamic model of student participation and effort in a course to study how grading weights on problem sets and midterms affect performance over the semester. Using rich data from an introductory economics course in Argentina, I find that shifting weight toward midterms increases participation and achievement among lower-performing students, while the opposite is true for higher-performing students. Offering students a menu of syllabi can substantially improve overall performance. In 2025, students could choose between alternative grading schemes. I use this data for out-of-sample validation and find that the characteristics and performance patterns of these students are consistent with the model implications.
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.