Working papers

When your bootstraps are not enough: How demand and supply interact to generate learning in settings of extreme poverty

with Maya Escueta

This paper is citable as National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper Number 31388.

Here is a video of me presenting it at the RISE 2021 annual conference.

Abstract

In settings of extreme poverty, how do demand and supply combine to produce child learning? In rural Gambia, caregivers with high aspirations for their children's future, measured before children start school, invest substantially more than others in children’s education. Despite this, essentially no children are literate or numerate three years later. When villages receive a highly impactful, teacher-focused supply-side intervention, however, children of high-aspirations caregivers are 25 percent more likely to achieve literacy and numeracy than others in the same village. We estimate patterns of substitutability and complementarity between demand and supply in generating learning that change with skill difficulty.

Articles published or forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals

What We Teach About Race and Gender: Representation in Images and Text of Children’s Books

with Anjali Adukia, Emileigh Harrison, Hakizumwami Birali Runesha, and Teodora Szasz

Quarterly Journal of Economics 2023, Volume 138, Issue 4, pages: 2225-2285

Here is coverage of it in TIME Magazine, The School Library Journal, FutureEd, and The 74 Million. Edutopia named it one of the 10 most important education studies of 2021. There is also a piece about it on the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal. Here is coverage of it by Teachers College.

Abstract

Books shape how children learn about society and norms, in part through representation of different characters. We use computational tools to characterize representation in children’s books widely read in homes, classrooms, and libraries over the past century and describe economic forces that may contribute to these patterns. We introduce new artificial intelligence methods for systematically converting images into data. We apply these tools, alongside text analysis methods, to measure skin color, race, gender, and age in the content of these books, documenting what has changed and what has endured over time. We find underrepresentation of Black and Latinx people in the most influential books, relative to their population shares, though representation of Black individuals increases over time. Females are also increasingly present but appear less often in text than in images, suggesting greater symbolic inclusion in pictures than substantive inclusion in stories. Characters in these influential books have lighter average skin color than in other books, even after conditioning on race, and children are depicted with lighter skin color than adults on average. We present empirical analysis of related economic behavior to better understand the representation we find in these books. On the demand side, we show that people consume books that center their own identities and that the types of children’s books purchased correlate with local political beliefs. On the supply side, we document higher prices for books that center nondominant social identities and fewer copies of these books in libraries that serve predominantly White communities.

Signals, Information, and the Value of College Names

with Feng Hu

This paper is forthcoming in the Review of Economics and Statistics (journal pre-print available in link above)

Here is a video of me presenting it at the NBER Education Program’s 2021 Fall meetings

Abstract

Colleges can send signals about their quality by adopting new, more alluring names. We study how this affects college choice and labor market performance of college graduates. Administrative data show name-changing colleges enroll higher-aptitude students, with larger effects for alluring-but-misleading name changes and among students with less information. A large resume audit study suggests a small premium for new college names in most jobs, and a significant penalty in lower-status jobs. We characterize student and employer beliefs using web-scraped text, surveys, and other data. Our study shows signals designed to change beliefs can have real, lasting impacts on market outcomes.

Gendered beliefs about math ability transmit across generations through children’s peers

with Feng Hu 

Nature Human Behaviour 2022, Volume 6, pages 868–879. PDF version here

This article was previously circulated as How important are beliefs about gender differences in math ability? Transmission across generations and impacts on child outcomes.

Here is a nice write-up of the paper in Nature, and another nice write-up of the paper in the World Bank’s Development Impact Blog. Here is Feng and my summary of it (and its companion paper) at GlobalDev. Here is a companion to it that we wrote for Nature’s Behind the Paper series. Here is a twitter thread we put together explaining it.

Abstract

In many societies, beliefs about differential intellectual ability by gender persist across generations. These societal beliefs can contribute to individual belief formation and thus lead to persistent gender inequality across multiple dimensions. We show evidence of intergenerational transmission of gender norms through peers and how this affects gender gaps in learning. We use nationally representative data from China and the random assignment of children to middle school classrooms to estimate the effect of being assigned a peer group with a high proportion of parents who believe boys are innately better than girls at learning math. We find this increases a child’s likelihood of holding the belief, with greater effects from peers of the same gender. It also affects the child’s demonstrated math ability, generating gains for boys and losses for girls. Our findings highlight how the informational environment in which children grow up can shape their beliefs and academic ability.

Large Learning Gains in Pockets of Extreme Poverty: Experimental Evidence from Guinea Bissau

with Ila Fazzio, Robin L. Lumsdaine, Peter Boone, Baboucarr Bouy, Jenny Hsieh, Chitra Jayanty, Simon Johnson, Ana Filipa Silva

Journal of Public Economics 2021, Volume 199: Article 104385

Here is a short, 1,500 word explainer of it on VoxEU and a video of me discussing it, along with the para-teacher study below, at the World Bank’s September 2021 Webinar on “Translating Research on Effective Teaching to Action” (talk starts at minute 5:05). Here is a twitter thread we put together explaining the paper along with a paper some of us published in the Journal of Development Economics the same year.

Abstract

Children in many extremely poor, remote regions are growing up illiterate and innumerate despite high reported school enrollment ratios. Possible explanations for such poor outcomes include demand – for example, low perceived returns to education compared to opportunity cost; and supply – poor state provision and inability of parents to coordinate and finance better schooling. We conducted a cluster-randomized trial in rural Guinea Bissau to understand the effectiveness and cost of concerted supply-based interventions in such contexts. Our intervention created simple schools offering four years of education to primary-school aged children in lieu of the government. At endline, children receiving the intervention scored 58.1 percentage points better than controls on early grade reading and math tests, demonstrating that the intervention taught children to read and perform basic arithmetic, from a counterfactual condition of very high illiteracy. Our results provide evidence that particularly needy areas may require more concerted, dramatic interventions in education than those usually considered, but that such interventions hold great potential for increasing education levels among the world’s poorest people.

How much can we remedy very low learning levels in rural parts of low-income countries? Impact and generalizability of a multi-pronged para-teacher intervention from a cluster- randomized trial in The Gambia

with Chris Frost, Alpha Camara, Baboucarr Bouy, Momodou Bah, Maitri Sivaraman, Jenny Hsieh, Chitra Jayanty, Tony Brady, Piotr Gawron, Stijn Vansteelandt, Peter Boone, Diana Elbourne

Journal of Development Economics 2021, Volume 148: Article 102539

Here is a video of me presenting a preliminary version at the RISE 2019 annual conference. Here is coverage of it by Teachers College. Here is a twitter thread we put together explaining the paper along with a paper some of us published in the Journal of Public Economics the same year.

Child beliefs, societal beliefs, and teacher-student identity match

with Feng Hu

Economics of Education Review 2020, Volume 77: Article 101994

This paper is citable as CDEP-CGEG Working Paper 43 (and also available as EdWorkingPaper 19-152).

(this paper updates and replaces its previous incarnation, which we circulated with the title “Stereotypes, Role Models, and the Formation of Beliefs”)

Here is a video of me presenting this paper at the University of Chicago (October 2017). Here is a twitter thread we put together explaining the paper.

Does primary school duration matter? Evaluating the consequences of a large Chinese policy experiment 

with Feng Hu

Economics of Education Review 2019, Volume 70: pages 61-74

NOTE: this paper was previously circulated under the titles "The Power of Credential Length Policy: Schooling Decisions and Returns in Modern China" and "The Importance of Educational Credentials: Schooling Decisions and Returns in Modern China"

Here is coverage of it in Marginal Revolution. Here’s a post I wrote about it for Economics that Matters.

On minimizing the risk of bias in randomized controlled trials in economics 

with Peter Boone and Diana Elbourne

The World Bank Economic Review 2017, Volume 31, Issue 3: pages 687–707

Also Centre for Economic Performance Discussion Paper No. 1240, September 2013

NOTE: previously circulated as “Risk and Evidence of Bias in Randomized Controlled Trials in Economics”

Here is coverage of it at the World Bank Impact Evaluation blog and Chris Blattman’s blog. Here’s a post we were invited to write for the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences.

Community health promotion and medical provision for neonatal health—CHAMPION cluster randomised trial in Nagarkurnool district, Telangana (formerly Andhra Pradesh), India

with Peter Boone, Vera Mann, Rohini Mukherjee, Chitra Jayanty, Chris Frost, M Reddy Padmanabh, Rashmi Lakshminarayana and Diana Elbourne.

PLoS Medicine 2017, Volume 14, Issue 7: Article e1002324

Here is coverage of it in Times of India and The Hindu.

The Support to Rural India’s Public Education System (STRIPES) trial: A Cluster Randomised Controlled Trial of Supplementary Teaching, Learning Material and Material Support

with Rashmi Lakshminarayana, Preetha Bhakta, Chris Frost, Peter Boone, Diana Elbourne, and Vera Mann.

PLoS ONE 2013, Volume 8, Issue 7: Article e65775 

Here is coverage of it in Centrepiece.

A Comparative Study to Assess the Lasting Impact of a Long-running Community-based Primary Health Care Programme on Under-5 Mortality in Jamkhed, India

with Peter Boone, Vera Mann, Chris Frost, and Ramaswamy Premkumar

Bulletin of the World Health Organization 2010, Volume 88: pages 727–73

Here is coverage coverage of it in the New York Times.

Papers Published in Computer Science Conference Proceedings

Tales and Tropes: Gender Roles from Word Embeddings in a Century of Children’s Books

with Anjali Adukia, Celia Anderson, Patricia Chiril, Callista Christ, Anjali Das, Alex Eble, Emileigh Harrison, and Hakizumwani Birali Runesha (2022)

COLING – 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Published study protocols and book chapters

Remedial After-school Support Classes Offered in Rural Gambia (The SCORE Trial): Study Protocol for a Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial

with Peter Boone, Alpha Camara, Diana Elbourne, Chris Frost, Samory Fernandes, Chitra Jayanty, Maitri Lenin, and Ana Filipa Silva

Trials 2015, 16:574

Child Mortality in Rural India: How the ASHA Programme Works, and How It Might Fail

in India’s Human Security: Lost Debates, Forgotten People, Intractable Challenges, Jason Miklian and Ashild Kolas, Editors, Routledge, New York. 2013

Support to Rural India’s Primary Education System – the STRIPES Trial

with Vera Mann, Preetha Bhakta, Rashmi Lakshminarayana, Chris Frost, Diana Elbourne and Peter Boone

Trials 2010, 11:10

Community Health and Medical Provision: Impact on Neonates (the CHAMPION trial)

with Peter Boone, Vera Mann, Tarana Mendiratta, Rohini Mukherjee, Ryan Figueiredo, Chitra Jayanty, Chris Frost, M Reddy Padmanabh and Diana Elbourne

BMC Pediatrics, 2007 7:26