Our Director Andrés Barrios Fernández and our Associate Jorge Rodríguez Osorio presented their work in the Annual Meeting of the Society of Labor Economists in Portland, Oregon.
The Annual Meeting of the Society of Labor Economists is one of the most prestigious conferences in labor economics. This year it was held between May 4th and 5th in Portland, Oregon. Four papers of Professors Barrios Fernández and Rodríguez Osorio were presented at the conference.
Professor Barrios-Fernández presented his paper “Closing Gaps in Higher Education Trajectories: The Effect of Targeted Information and Mentorship” and “Direct and Indirect Effects of Affirmative Action in University Admissions”. In addition, his work “The STEM Major Gender Gap: Evidence from Coordinated College Application Platforms in Five Continents” was presented at the conference by his coauthor José Montalbán-Castilla. Professor Rodríguez-Osorio presented his paper “Earned Income Subsidies, Female Labor Supply, and the Role of Informational Frictions”
This project uses a large-scale RCT to evaluate in a unified setting—i.e., Chile—a low-touch and a high-touch intervention designed to help high school senior students to make informed choices about their postsecondary education trajectories. In line with previous research, we find that providing information alone improves students’ understanding of the higher education system but does not make a difference in their probability of applying to or enrolling in college. In contrast, providing information and mentoring increases students’ probability of registering and taking the college admission exam by 12.8 percentage points, of applying for funding by 10.3 percentage points, and of enrolling in higher education by 8 percentage points. The increase in higher education enrollment is similarly explained by an increase in attendance to universities and to vocational higher education institutions. The design of the RCT also allows us to study spillovers of the mentoring program on the classmates and friends of treated students. We find evidence of strong social spillovers. Despite not finding evidence of social learning among classmates of treated students—i.e., they do not improve their understanding of the higher education system—they become 5.1 percentage points more likely to register and 5 percentage points more likely to actually take the college admission exam. Nevertheless, they do not become more likely to apply for funding or to university, and as a result, we do not find evidence of them becoming more likely to enroll in higher education. In contrast, close friends of treated students do improve their understanding of the higher education system and become 5 percentage points more likely to apply to university and 4 percentage points more likely to enroll in higher education. These results suggest that social spillovers can multiply the effect of policies designed to expand access to higher education and that they can be used to improve the cost efficiency of college-going interventions.
This paper provides causal evidence that giving preferential access to college to talented students from disadvantaged backgrounds not only benefits them but also their younger siblings and neighbors. We study a program that reserves places for students completing high school in the top 10% of their class. We thus overcome en- dogeneity concerns using a regression discontinuity design through which we compare the outcomes of individuals whose high school GPA places them marginally above and below of the top 10% of their class. We proceed in a similar way to estimate indirect e↵ects, as we compare individuals with an older sibling or neighbor near the eligibility threshold for preferential admissions. Eligibility for preferential admissions increases four-year college enrollment by 4 (9%) percentage points and college completion by 1.8 (5%) percentage points. The younger siblings and close neighbors of direct ben- eficiaries also benefit from the program. They become around 2 percentage points more likely to attend and to complete a four-year college degree. Social spillovers of programs that expand access to college are not trivial and should be incorporated in the evaluation and design of this type of program.
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 countries 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 24% in Uganda to 46% in Sweden. In the settings 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 way these top scoring students submitted their applications. 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 countries—between 21 and 25 percentage points in all countries, but China, where it reaches 37%. 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 gap in the way men and women make choices about major does not decrease significantly with economic development.
The goal of this project is to estimate the causal effects of earned income subsidies on women’s labor supply and their children’s human capital. To this end, we exploit a unique setting in Chile, where an earnings subsidy program—otherwise similar to the Earned Income Tax Credit in the United States—provides benefits only for woman below a target defined by a vulnerability score. Using administrative data on nearly two million potential beneficiaries, their labor market outcomes, and their children’s academic performance, we propose a Regression Discontinuity design to estimate causal effects of the program on women’s labor supply and on their children’s human capital. Our project seeks to provide new evidence about this important policy drawing from unique data and research design.
Andrés and Jorge are Associate Researchers at the Human Development Lab and Assistant Professors at the School of Business and Economics at the Universidad de los Andes, Chile. You can find drafts and summaries of their work in our repository. For further details, visit their academic websites:
