Awards
I was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (2015-2018) as well as a Jacobs Foundation Early Career Research Fellowship (2019-2021) to study socioeconomic differences in parenting and educational decisions.
Selected Publications
Parental Beliefs about Returns to Different Types of Investments in School Children
with O. Attanasio and C. Rauh, Journal of Human Resources, 57(6), 2022
Parental Beliefs about Returns to Child Health Investments
with P. Biroli, A. Raja and C. Rauh, Journal of Econometrics, 231(1), 2022
Can Perceived Returns Explain Enrollment Gaps in Postgraduate Education?
with M. Golin and C. Rauh, Labour Economics, 77, 2022
What Drives Enrollment Gaps in Further Education? The Role of Beliefs in Sequential Schooling Decisions
with C. Belfield, C. Rauh and J. Shaw, Economica, 87(346), 2020, 490-529
Ever Failed, Try Again, Succeed Better: Results from a Randomized Educational Intervention on Grit
with S. Alan and S. Ertac, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134(3), 2019
Parental Beliefs about Returns to Educational Investments – The Later the Better?
with C. Rauh, Journal of the European Economic Association, 16(6), 2018
project highlights
Fostering socio-emotional skills
In joint work with Sule Alan and Seda Ertac, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, we show that grit, a skill that has been shown to be highly predictive of achievement, is malleable in childhood and can be fostered in the classroom environment.
We evaluate a randomized educational intervention implemented in two independent elementary school samples. Treated students are more likely to exert effort to accumulate task-specific ability and more likely to succeed on an incentivized real-effort task. They also score 0.2 standard deviations higher on a standardized math test.
Overall, our results suggest that educational interventions targeting socio-emotional skills can be very effective in raising achievement.
