Research Statement
Publications
Sexual Orientation and Labor Market Disparities Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Vol 212. pp. 723-755, 2023.
This paper assesses labor market disparities against sexual minorities. My empirical strategy allows schooling, employment, and income to be endogenously determined relying on the identification of unobserved heterogeneity (skills and sexual orientation). I find that disparities are more prevalent at the employment margin than at the earnings margin. Sexual minorities are 10–20 percentage points less likely to be employed than comparable heterosexual adults. The results suggest that selection into employment contributes to the elimination of the observed income gaps among the employed as the average sexual-minority worker is more skilled than their heterosexual counterpart.
Unintended Consequences of Free College: Self-Selection into the Teaching Profession. Economics of Education Review, Vol 89. pp. 102260, 2022. (with Rosa Castro-Zarzur and Ricardo Espinoza)
In this paper, we study how making college tuition-free affects the pool of students pursuing a teaching career. We exploit the conjunction of two tuition-financing policies implemented in Chile: a scholarship introduced in 2011 for teaching majors, and a massive 2016 reform that made college tuition-free for students from households in the bottom 50% of the income distribution. We use the programs’ differences in timing and eligibility criteria to study the effects free college had on the self-selection into teaching programs. We find that free college decreased the relative returns to pursuing a teaching program. We find that the reform reduced the average academic qualifications of the pool of students entering the teaching programs, which can negatively affect long-term teacher quality.
Victimization and Skill Accumulation: The Case of School Bullying. Journal of Human Resources, Accepted.
This paper examines how bullying depletes skills in school children. I formulate a dynamic model of skill accumulation with endogenous victimization based on the identification of unobserved heterogeneity. I allow victimization to depend on each student’s traits and those of her classmates. Using a unique longitudinal dataset on middle school students, I find that victimization depletes current skill levels by 40% of a standard deviation for the average child. This skill depletion causes the individual to become 34% more likely to experience bullying again. Therefore bullying triggers a self-reinforcing mechanism that opens an ever-growing skill gap. Finally, I find evidence that supports the allocation of students in more skill-homogeneous classrooms as a tool to reduce victimization.
[Working Paper Version] [Web Appendix]
The Children of the Missed Pill. Journal of Health Economics, Vol 79, 2021. (with Tomás Rau and Sergio Urzúa)
We assess the impact of exogenous variation in oral contraceptives prices—a year-long decline followed by a sharp increase due to a documented collusion case—on fertility decisions and newborns' outcomes. As prices skyrocketed (45% within a few weeks), the Pill's consumption plunged, and weekly conceptions increased (3.2% after a few months). We show that the incidence of low birth weight and fetal/infant deaths increased (declined) as the cost of birth control pills rose (fell). We also document a disproportional increase in the weekly miscarriage and stillbirth rates. As children reached school age, we find lower school enrollment rates and higher participation in special education programs. Our evidence suggests these "extra" conceptions were more likely to face adverse conditions during critical periods of development.
[Working Paper Vesion]
Media Coverage: [The Washington Post] [MarketWatch]
Bullying in Teenagers, The Role of Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Skills. Quantitative Economics, Vol 12(3), pp. 945-980, 2021. (with Sergio Urzúa)
This paper quantifies the negative consequences of bullying allowing for the possibility that victims and nonvictims differ in unobservable characteristics. We introduce a factor analytic model for identifying treatment effects of bullying in which latent cognitive and noncognitive skills determine victimization and multiple outcomes. Applying our method to longitudinal data from South Korea, we first show that while noncognitive skills reduce the chances of being bullied during middle school, the probability of being victimized is greater in classrooms with relatively high concentration of boys, previously self‐assessed bullies and students that come from violent families. We report bullying at age 15 has negative effects on physical and mental health outcomes at age 18. We document positive effects on the take‐up of risky behaviors and negative effects on schooling attainment. Our findings suggest that investing in noncognitive development should guide policy efforts intended to deter this problematic behavior.
Adults’ Cognitive and Socioemotional Skills and Their Labor Market Outcomes in Colombia Revista de Economía del Rosario. Vol 23(1), pp. 109-148, 2020. (with Pablo Acosta and Noël Muller).
Previous research mainly from high-income countries has shown that people with higher cognitive skills and socioemotional skills get better labor market outcomes. It is unclear, however, if this conclusion applies to low- and middle-income countries. In this paper, we explore how cognitive and socioemotional skills of adults relate to their labor market outcomes in the context of Colombia. Controlling for a range of confounding factors in a cross-sectional survey, we find that adults with higher cognitive skills have better jobs (with higher earnings, more formal, and high-skilled) and are more likely to complete tertiary education. Socioemotional skills correlate more modestly with having a better job but more strongly with labor market participation and tertiary-education completion.
Implementing Factor Models for Unobserved Heterogeneity in Stata. The Stata Journal. Vol 16(1) pp. 197-228, 2016. (with Sergio Urzúa)
We introduce a new command, heterofactor, for the maximum likelihood estimation of models with unobserved heterogeneity, including a Roy model. heterofactor fits models with up to four latent factors and allows the unobserved heterogeneity to follow general distributions. Our command differs from Stata's sem command in that it does not rely on the linearity of the structural equations and distributional assumptions for identification of the unobserved heterogeneity. It uses the estimated distributions to numerically integrate over the unobserved factors in the outcome equations by using a mixture of normals in a Gauss–Hermite quadrature. heterofactor delivers consistent estimates, including the unobserved factor loadings, in a variety of model structures.
Submitted & Re-submitted
Effects of Disruptive Peers in Endogenous Social Networks R&R at Quantitative Economics. (with Torsten Santavirta)
Childhood Gender Nonconformity and Gender Gaps in Life Outcomes. Under Review. (with Abigail Banan and Torsten Santavirta)
We study the role of childhood gender conformity in determining gender gaps. We present a conceptual framework that uses gender norms to explain why some women make less profitable choices than comparable men. Using unique longitudinal survey and register data, we show that gender-nonconforming girls have substantially better education and labor market outcomes than gender-conforming girls. In contrast, gender-nonconforming boys perform substantially worse at school, sort into lower-paying occupations, earn less, and have a greater incidence of mental health disorders and substance abuse during adulthood than gender-conforming boys. Our analyses suggest that such divergence develops from an early age.
The Impact of Modernizing Koranic Schools on Cognitive and Socio-Emotional Development. Under Review. (with Moustapha Lo and Koji Miyamoto)
This study assesses the impact of a large-scale randomized intervention in Senegal designed to bring Math and French teaching to Koranic Schools. We consider two treatments. One in which teachers received socioemotional learning (SEL) training and one in which they did not. We find sizable impacts of the non-SEL intervention, driven by improvements in math and language building blocks. However, we also find that the SEL-trained teachers achieved null effects. The null effects respond to the communities' resistance to the SEL intervention as it was wrongly considered a vehicle for Western values that antagonize Conservative Islamic morals.
Book Chapters
Saltiel, F., M. Sarzosa, & S. Urzúa. (2017). Cognitive and socio-emotional abilities. In G. Jones, J. Johnes, T. Agasisti, & L. Lopez Torres (Eds.), Handbook of Contemporary Education Economics. Cheltenham, UK.
This chapter reviews the nature of cognitive and socio-emotional abilities and examines their importance in the development of successful lives. The text highlights the evidence documenting the causal association between abilities and labour market outcomes. It introduces an occupational tasks framework and shows how the interaction of abilities, skills and tasks is important for understanding labour market disparities. It concludes with policy recommendations based on interventions aimed at improving skills and future avenues for this research agenda.
Working Papers
Grade Retention and Multidimensional Skill Formation in Young Children (with Fernando Saltiel)
This paper estimates the impacts of early grade retention on children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skill development. We present and estimate a dynamic model of multidimensional skill formation, with endogenous retention outcomes. We use ECLS- K data covering students’ test scores, non-cognitive skills, retention events along with parents’ skills and investment choices. Low cognitive and non-cognitive skilled students are far more likely to be retained. Although in general, the skill production processes exhibit self-productivity, strong effects of parental investments, and that parents’ skills affect children’s’ skill indirectly through investment, the technology of skill formation differs across retention status. Retention negatively impacts students’ cognitive abili- ties, yet leads to positive effects for high-skilled students at baseline. Grade repetition boosts non-cognitive skills for low-skilled students at baseline. Targeted retention policy changes could improve children’s skill development.
Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Skills for the Peruvian Labor Market. Policy Research Working Paper 7750. February 2016. (with Wendy Cunningham and Monica Parra Torrado)
The paper estimates a structural latent model with unobserved heterogeneity to capture full ability rather than just measured skill. The analysis confirms that cognitive and non-cognitive skills are positively correlated with a range of labor market outcomes in Peru. In particular, cognitive skills positively correlate with wages and the probability of being a wage worker, white-collar, and formal worker. The patterns are less uniform for non-cognitive skills. For instance, grit emerges strongly for most outcomes regardless of methodology. However, plasticity—an aggregation of openness to experience and emotional stability—is only correlated with employment.
Returns to Higher Education in Chile and ColombiaIDB Working Paper Series 587. March 2015. (with Carolina Gonzalez-Velosa and G. Rucci and S. Urzua)
In the last decades, countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have experienced a dramatic increase in the levels of higher education enrollment. Using administrative data from Chile and Colombia, we find that this phenomenon is not always associated with higher private individual returns. In both countries, there is a significant dispersion in the net returns to higher education and a significant proportion of graduates could be facing negative returns. This means that, for many higher education graduates, net earnings might have been higher if they had not earned a higher education degree. We hypothesize that while there have been major policy efforts to increase coverage, institutional arrangements that encourage quality and relevance has been insufficient. .
The Causal Effects of Skills: An International Study. Background paper for the OECD International Skills Report, 2014. (with Ricardo Espinoza and Sergio Urzúa)
Friends First: Political Determinants of Targeting in Decentralized Poverty Alleviation Programs
The Social Investment Fund (FIS) of Guatemala, a demand-driven poverty alleviation program, over which the central government has substantial discretion in making allocations, provides an unusual opportunity to study the political influences on the distributions of public funds. This article uses GMM to estimate a dynamic panel data model of the expenditures made by the FIS on different municipalities. I utilize data on the political aliation of local authorities and electoral results to evaluate if electoral timing and political aliations matter in FIS investment allocations. In addition, I take advantage of the discontinuity generated by the general elections in which national and local authorities changed. First, I find that FIS disbursements peaked during elections year, while other less discretionary sources of funding did not. Second, FIS disbursements were greater in municipalities in which local electoral elections were tight. Third, municipalities with mayors belonging to the same political party as the President received greater amounts of FIS funds than municipalities with mayors having different political aliations.
Community Heterogeneity and Collective Action in Demand-Driven Poverty Reduction Programs OVE Working Paper 05/10, 2010. (with Yuri Soares)
This paper looks at the role of ethnic heterogeneity on collective action and project choice in Guatemala. Using administrative data from a social investment fund, household surveys data, and the 1994 Census, we find that ethnically homogeneous communities are able to obtain investment projects quicker, and conditional on obtaining projects these communities prefer projects of a public good nature versus private goods. The results also show that while income inequality is not relevant for explaining how early the community agrees, it becomes an important determinant of the nature of the project chosen. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that differences in preferences or differential transaction costs across ethnic lines make the possibility of collective action less likely.
The Welfare Impacts of Local Investment Projects: Evidence from the Guatemala FIS. OVE Working Paper 02/08, 2008. (with Pablo Ibarrarán and Yuri Soares)
This paper assesses the welfare impacts of local investments projects in rural areas of Guatemala. Using census track data from two rounds of the Guatemalan population census, as well as administrative data on investment projects, we estimate the impact of investment activities at the village level on measures of welfare. This is the first impact evaluation of social funds in Guatemala. we find that local investment in schools significantly boosts enrollment and investments in water and sewerage significantly improved measures of access to water. We also examine the welfare impacts in regards to infant mortality and school progression.
When Will the Poor Vote? Parties, Politics and Constitutional Changes in the XIX Century Colombia. Serie Documentos CEDE, 2008-05 (in Spanish)
Work in Progress
"Classroom networks and school victimization: How personality traits keep you safe” (with Manuel Eisner, Denis Ribeaud and Torsten Santavirta).
"Skill Formation and College Enrollment" (with Ricardo Espinoza and Sergio Urzúa)
"Weight at Birth and Gender Gaps" (with Sergio Urzúa)
Dormant Research
FGLS Estimation of Panel Data Models with Serial Correlation, Fixed Effects and Missing Data (with Raymond Guiteras and Roger Moon)
[go to xtargls website]
Unemployment Protection for Informal Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean. IADB Working Papers No. WP-385, April 2013. (with Alan Finkelstein-Shapiro)