Working Papers

• Impact of Teenage Childbearing on Educational Attainment and Labor Force Participation in Ecuador (Job Market Paper) 

Reducing teenage childbearing remains a policy priority in low- and middle-income countries, as teen motherhood is associated with lower educational attainment and labor force participation (LFP). Yet recent empirical work has shown that its effects on education and labor outcomes are not always negative, once accounting for selection bias and differences across groups. In this paper, I estimate the impact of teenage childbearing in Ecuador, a country that despite decades of policy efforts, consistently has some of the highest adolescent fertility rates in Latin America. Using a nationally representative survey on women’s health, I exploit variation in menarche timing (or age of first menstrual period) to instrument for the probability of teenage childbearing. I find no significant differences in educational attainment and LFP between teen mothers and other women in the sample, ruling out large negative effects. I show the results are not driven by differences across age cohorts, nor urban and rural localities. I find suggestive evidence that grandmother co-habitation could moderate these effects, allowing young mothers to continue their education. 

• It’s all Fun and Games? The Persistent Effects of Willingness to Pay Experiments (with Jenny Aker, Brian Dillon, and Anne Krahn) (Draft coming soon!)

Willingness-to-pay (WTP) experiments have been widely used to assess demand for a variety of products. Yet can they also generate persistent and large impacts on adoption and welfare?  We answer this question using a randomized controlled trial of a baseline WTP experiment, combined with in-person and phone survey data over a four-year period.  We find that a simple experiment leads to positive and persistent effects on adoption and usage of an improved storage technology, resulting in significantly less pesticide use and fewer storage losses after three years.  These results are primarily driven by those households who were able to experience the product.  The experiment is also cost-effective as compared with demonstrations and free distributions. 

• Does Increasing Productive Credit Availability Improve Financial Inclusion? Evidence from El Salvador (with Oscar Mitnik, Edgar Salgado, and Alejandro Tamola)

We study how greater credit availability in the financial market causally induces financial inclusion in El Salvador. We match credit bureau records to El Salvador’s Development Bank (Bandesal) client portfolio, and using difference in difference methods, find that loan recipients are more likely to obtain new, high-quality loans, whereas their probability to default remains unchanged. The effects appear to be driven mostly by first-time clients who did not have any credit history 24 months before receiving the loan.

Work in Progress

• The Impact of an Executive Education Program on High-Ability Student's Incursion in Public Service

This project seeks to understand the effects an executive education program aimed at promoting public service among high-achieving college students from Latin America. I leverage a competitive application process and extensive baseline information on the selected, waitlisted, and rejected finalists to show that the selected and waitlisted groups are tightly balanced across observables. I then conduct a comparison between these groups to understand whether the program increased public service employment among participants.