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Welcome to my website! I am an Assistant Professor at the School of Business and Economics and the Director of the Human Development Lab at the Universidad de Los Andes. I am also an Associate at the Centre for Economic Performance at LSE,
an Affiliate at the CEPR , and a Research Affiliate at IZA.
I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Economics at LSE in 2019, and completed a postdoc at the Department of Economics at MIT in 2022.
My research interests cover different topics in labor and public economics, but I primarily work on the economics of education. Through my research, I aim to contribute to understanding and tackling inequality on educational attainment
and on access to opportunities.
This paper provides causal evidence that close neighbors significantly influence potential applicants’
decision to attend university. I create a unique dataset combining detailed geographic information and
individual educational records in Chile, and exploit the quasi-random variation generated by student loans eligibility rules.
I find that potential applicants are significantly more likely to attend and complete university when their closest neighbor—-defined
as the closest individual applying to university one year before—-becomes eligible for a student loan and enrolls in university.
This increase in enrollment is mediated by an increase in the probability of taking the admission exam and applying to university.
The closest neighbor typically lives 0.09 km away, and neighbors’ influence decays with distance. My results highlight the importance
of social influences for university enrollment decisions and suggest that financial aid and university access policies may have important
spillover effects.
Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions but causal identification
of those effects is notoriously challenging. Using data from Chile, Croatia, Sweden, and the United States, we
study within-family spillovers in college and major choice across a variety of national contexts. Exploiting
college-specific admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings’ college options, we
show that in all four countries a meaningful portion of younger siblings follow their older sibling to the same
college or college-major combination. Older siblings are followed regardless of whether their target and counterfactual
options have large, small or even negative differences in quality. Spillover effects disappear, however, if the older
sibling drops out of college, suggesting that older siblings’ college experiences matter. That siblings influence
important human capital investment decisions across such varied contexts suggests that our findings are not an artifact
of particular institutional detail but instead a more generalizable description of human behavior. Causal links between
the postsecondary paths of close peers may partly explain persistent college enrollment inequalities between social
groups and suggests that interventions to improve college access may have multiplier effects.
This paper investigates whether the effects of a reform that substantially increased daily instruction time in
Chilean primary schools vary depending on school institutions. Focusing on incumbent students and exploiting an
IV strategy, we find that longer daily schedules increase reading scores at the end of fourth grade and that the
benefits are greater for pupils who began primary education in no-fee charter schools rather than in public schools.
We provide evidence that these two types of publicly subsidized establishments, which cater to similar students but
differ in their degree of autonomy, expand the teaching input in different ways: in order to provide the additional
instruction time, no-fee charter schools rely more on hiring new teachers and less on increasing teachers’ working
hours than public schools do.
Rehabilitating convicted criminals is challenging; indeed, an important share of them returnto prison only a few years after their release.
Thus, finding effective ways of encouraging crimedesistance, particularly among young individuals, has become an important policy goal to reducecrime and incarceration rates.
This paper provides causal evidence that the local institutionsof the neighborhood that receives young individuals after prison matter.
Specifically, we showthat the opening of an Evangelical church reduces twelve-months re-incarceration rates amongproperty crime offenders by more than 10 percentage points.
This effect represents a drop of 16% in the probability of returning to prison for this group of individuals. We find smaller and less precise effects for more severe types of crime.
We discuss three classes of mechanisms thatcould explain our results: social support, promotion of evangelical values, and social monitoring.
We provide evidence that the social support provided by evangelical churches is an importantdriver of our findings.
This suggests that non-religious local institutions could also play an important role in the rehabilitation of former inmates.
The identification of peer effects is challenging. There are many factors not related to social
influences that could explain correlations among peers. This article discusses the main challenges
for the identification of peer effects, describes some of the empirical strategies commonly
used to overcome these challenges, and summarizes the main findings of the literature on peer
effects in education. Peers have been shown to affect many important outcomes, including
academic performance and educational trajectories. Confirming the existence of peer effects is
important from a policy perspective. Both the cost-benefit analysis and the design of policies
are likely to be affected by the existence of social spillovers. However, making general policy
recommendations from the current evidence is not easy. The size of the peer effects documented
in the literature varies substantially across settings and depending on how peers are defined
and characterized. Understanding what is behind this heterogeneity is thus key to extract
more general policy lessons. Access to better data and the ability to map social networks will
likely facilitate investigating which peers and which characteristics matter the most in different
contexts. Conducting more research on the mechanisms behind peer effects is also important.
Understanding these drivers is key to take advantage of social spillovers in the design of new
educational programs, to identify competing policies, and to gain a deeper understanding of the
nature and relevance of different forms of social interactions for the youth.
This paper uses rich administrative data from Chile to estimate teacher-value
added (TVA) on test scores and on an index of educational attainment. We allow each teacher to have a different TVA for male and female students and show
that differences in TVA explain an important part of the gender gaps we observe
in test scores and in postsecondary education trajectories. We next exploit rich
information on teaching practices and show that at least in terms of the practices
we observe there do not seem to be important differences in what makes teachers
effective for male and female students. We do find, however, significant associations
between certain practices and teacher effectiveness, which suggest that some teaching strategies benefit all students independently of their gender. Finally, we also
show that on average female teachers are more effective at teaching female students
and that math teachers tend to be biased in favor of male students. Interestingly,
teachers with smaller gender biases seem to be more effective for both, male and
female students.
Do elite colleges help talented students join the social elite, or help incumbent elites retain their positions?
We combine intergenerationally-linked data from Chile with a regression discontinuity design to show that, looking across generations,
elite colleges do both. Lower-status individuals who gain admission to elite college programs transform their children’s social environment.
Children become more likely to attend high status private schools and colleges, and to live near and befriend high-status peers.
In contrast, academic achievement is unaffected. Simulations combining descriptive and quasi-experimental findings show that elite colleges tighten
the link between social and human capital while decreasing intergenerational social mobility.
The rapid decline of Nokia mobile phone operations in 2009–2012 left many high-skilled workers looking for new career paths. We use rich matched employer-employee data covering all Nokia workers and other individuals in Finland to study how this sudden labor market shock affected displaced workers. We find that workers displaced from Nokia experienced large and long- lasting losses in the labor market. They suffered large drops in earnings and were more likely to be unemployed than similar workers displaced from other firms even three years after the mass layoffs took place. These losses, however, were attenuated by an important increase in entrepreneurship. We find that a distinctively large share of the high-skilled Nokia workers established a new business after being displaced (9% compared to 3% for displaced workers from other firms). This effect was amplified by generous start-up grants provided by Nokia since 2011 as a part of Bridge, their global support program for displaced workers. The larger number of entrepreneurs does not seem to have resulted in lower entrepreneurial quality. The firms founded by former Nokia employees perform similarly to those founded by similar workers displaced from other firms or to all those established in Finland during the decline of Nokia. This result suggests that encouraging high-skilled displaced workers to become entrepreneurs can reduce the costs of mass layoffs, as it increases the number of established firms without significantly affecting their performance.
This paper uses data from coordinated application and admissions systems in Australia,
Brazil, Chile, China, Finland, Greece, Spain, Sweden, Uganda, and Taiwan to document differences
in gender representation among talented students applying to STEM majors. These ten
settings are very different in size, economic development, culture, gender norms, and geographic
location. However, in all of them, university admission decisions rely on algorithms that allocate
students to specific college-major combinations based on their academic performance when
applying to university. We focus on students scoring in the top 10% of the university admission
exam and show that female representation among STEM-major applicants varies from 22% in
Taiwan to 46% in Sweden. In the contexts we study, these differences can be driven either
by gender gaps in academic performance at the time of application or by gender gaps in the
programs that these top-scoring students rank in their application lists. While we find some
significant variation in female representation among top 10% scores—32.3% in Uganda to 65.6%
in Sweden—we find a remarkably stable gender gap in applications to STEM across settings—
between 22 and 29 percentage points in all education systems, but China and Australia, where
it reaches 37% and 16% respectively. These results indicate that i.) closing gaps in academic
performance is not enough to eliminate inequality in college trajectories across gender groups
and ii.) the gender gap in major choices does not significantly vary with economic development.
Click here to see my working papers and ongoing projects.