Job Market Paper

"Financial Pressure and Career Choices"

Abstract: This paper studies the effect of higher education financing, with a special focus on student debt repayment plan, on the human capital and the field of study of the U.S. population. I develop a dynamic discrete-continuous choice model that accounts for different education, occupation and fields of studies heterogeneity and I estimate it with rich financial data that allows to also model student debt decisions of individuals. The results show that allowing for an income-driven repayment plan increases graduation on average by 3p.p. The effect is stronger for low income individuals, since they are more elastic to the policy. The increase in graduation mainly comes from a reduction in drop-out rates among financially constrained high skilled students. The field composition of the economy also changes, specially among low income individuals that are 50% more likely to change their fields compared with high income ones. The introduction of the policy allows for a better sorting on preferences, and the average switcher experiences an increase in non-consumption taste for the field of study.

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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.