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.
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.