with Friederike Lenel and Claudia Schupp, revise and resubmit, Journal of Development Economics
Students in low-income contexts often lack guidance in their career decisions which can lead to a misallocation of educational investments. We report on a randomized field experiment conducted with 1715 students in rural Cambodia and show that a half-day workshop designed to support adolescents in developing occupational aspirations increased educational investments. We document substantial heterogeneity in treatment effects by baseline student performance. While the workshop increased schooling efforts of high-performing students, treated low-performing students reduced their educational investments. We develop a simple model that explains why an information intervention can affect educational aspirations and investments in opposing directions.
revise and resubmit, World Development
We examine how shocks to migration opportunities affect schooling outcomes in origin communities. We focus on the migration between Mexico and the United States, and exploit the expansion of the Secure Communities program in the US — a federal data-sharing program that substantially increased the risk of deportation for illegal migrants— as exogenous shock to the attractiveness of illegal migration. Our results suggest that the Secure Communities program increased attendance, enrollment, and educational attainment in municipalities that had stronger migration network links with counties in the US that adopted the program early-on relative to municipalities that had ties with US counties that introduced the policy somewhat later. These results are consistent with the interpretation that the Secure Communities program raised the returns to education in Mexico by making low-skill migration to the US less attractive.
with Sofia Badini, Friederike Lenel and Claudia Schupp, accepted, Journal of Human Capital
We implement a randomized controlled trial in a low-income context to investigate whether students in lower-secondary school acquire information about potential career paths more effectively if this information is preceded by a task that allows students to explore their own interests and if the career information is ordered by the congruence between the careers and the student’s personality. We find that self-exploration in combination with the personalized display increases student information acquisition. Students also read about more diverse career paths and, low-performing students in particular, shift their focus from occupations that require university education towards those that require a high-school degree and are potentially more achievable.
with Andrew D. Foster, new version coming soon. Non-technical summary. NBER WP.
We study the relationship between risk and schooling investment in a low-income setting. We show theoretically that parents respond to variance by reducing investment ex ante if the human capital production function exhibits dynamic complementarity and parental preferences for human capital are not too concave. We estimate the key parameters of the structural model, which suggest that the elimination of variance would result in a 15-18% increase in investments attributable to an ex ante response. We then use cross-village variation in risk over time and estimate an ex ante elasticity of study time with respect to variance of -0.05. Finally, we simulate the effects of an implicit social insurance program, modeled after the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). Our results suggest that the risk-reducing effect of the NREGS may offset adverse effects on child education that were evident during the NREGS phase-in due to rising wages.
"Confined to stay: Migration restrictions, Natural Disasters and Poverty" (with Andrea Cinque and Lennart Reiners), Journal of Development Economics, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2025.103605 [open access].
"Regulating manufacturing FDI: Local labor market responses to a protectionist policy" (with Robert Genthner and Krisztina Kis-Katos), Journal of Development Economics, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2025.103563 [open access]. Data.
"COVID-19 crisis, economic hardships and schooling outcomes" (with Friederike Lenel and Claudia Schupp), Education Finance and Policy. 2022. https://doi.org/10.1162/edfp_a_00378. Ungated version. Data.
"Agricultural modernization and fertility: Evidence from the oil palm boom in Indonesia" (with Christoph Kubitza), Journal of Human Resources. 2021. https://doi.org/10.3368/jhr.0520-10905R1. Ungated version. Data.
"Links between maternal employment and child nutrition in rural Tanzania" (with Bethelem Legesse Debela and Matin Qaim), American Journal of Agricultural Economics 103: 812-830. 2021. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajae.12113 (Open Access)
"Productive Effects of Public Works Programs: What do we know? What should we know?" (with Renate Hartwig), World Development 107: 111-124. 2018. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2018.02.031. Ungated version.
“An Employment Guarantee as risk insurance? Assessing the effects of the NREGA on agricultural production decisions”, World Bank Economic Review 33 (2): 413–435. 2019. doi: 10.1093/wber/lhw067. Ungated version. Data.
“Do cows have negative returns?” (with Michael Grimm), Economic Development and Cultural Change 66 (4): 676-707. https://doi.org/10.1086/697414. Ungated version.
“The insurability framework applied to agricultural microinsurance: What do we know, what can we learn?”, Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance, 39, pp. 264–279, 2014.
Inequalities in investments in education (with Michelle Gonzalez Amador, data collection complete)
Large-scale land acquisitions and poverty (with Mouhammed Rassoul Sy, draft coming soon)
Can Life Skills Foster Child Learning? Evidence from Primary Schools in India (with Tomohisa Miyamoto and Joost de Laat, draft coming soon)
Labor-saving technical change and structural transformation (with Krisztina Kis-Katos, data collection in progress)
Parental resource allocation, educational inequalities between siblings, and their welfare effects in adulthood (funded)