Job Market Paper

"Financial Pressure and Career Choices"

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of student debt repayment plans on educational attainment and field of study choices of U.S. youth. To this end, I develop and estimate a dynamic human capital investment model in which highly heterogeneous individuals make college enrollment, field of study, labor supply and financial choices over their early career. I fit my model to data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) that allows me to disentangle the determinants of educational and major choices as well as college debt. I then evaluate the effect of a very generous repayment plan introduced in 2023 known as "Saving on Valuable Education" (SAVE). Results indicate that the implementation of SAVE increases graduation rates by an average of 2 percentage points, with a more pronounced effect among low-income individuals, who are more responsive to the policy. This increase primarily results from a reduction in dropout rates among financially constrained students. Additionally, the field composition of the economy shifts, particularly among low-income students, who are 50% more likely to change fields than their high-income counterparts.

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Other Work in Progress

"Pre-school Education and Long-Run Human Capital Formation" with Elisabetta Aurino, Katherina Thomas and Sharon Wolf

Abstract: Early childhood interventions are increasingly used to enhance skill development and reduce learning poverty. However, evidence on their long-term effects remains limited, with some studies indicating a fade-out of initial gains. In this paper, we aim to investigate the mechanisms that may contribute to the fade-out of these interventions by examining the long-term impacts of a preschool program in Ghana, targeted at improving teaching and parental awareness. Leveraging the exogenous variation from a randomized controlled trial of a preschool intervention, jointly with a structural model of skill formation and parental investments, we measure the effects on both cognitive and socio-emotional skills over time. Using rich collected panel data and variation in treatment, we aim to explore several potential mechanisms behind the fade-out effect, including low self-productivity of skills, parental beliefs about the production function, changes in parental investments in response to skill levels, and shifts in the production function due to the intervention. We also propose a novel framework to estimate skill production functions that accounts for heterogeneous information across skill measures, thereby increasing precision in the estimation of long-term effects.


"Preferences For School Composition in Catalonia"

Abstract: This study wants to examine the impact of a policy introduced by the Catalan government aimed at reducing school segregation. The policy altered the assignment mechanisms for both public and publicly funded private schools in an effort to mitigate segregation. The objective of the paper is to provide reduced-form evidence on parental responses to identify preferences for school-peer composition across different socioeconomic levels. The hypothesis of the work is that parents with higher socioeconomic status might switch into schools unaffected by the policy to maintain similar peer environments. After that, I am developing a structural model of parental schooling choice to understand the determinants of schooling segregation.