About Me

Welcome to my personal website. I am a Ph.D. student in Economics and Education at Columbia University.

Contact

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Research Interest

My research topics are higher education and the transition to the labor market.

Working Papers

Is Integration Equal to Inclusion? College Integration and Students’ Social Interactions: Evidence from Turnstiles Data Draft.

The efforts to desegregate schools by helping low–income students to attend elite institutions have spread around the world. However, the evidence on how students' social networks respond to such policies remains scant. While there is evidence indicating that school integration fosters upward mobility and more positive views towards others (Chetty al., 2020; Fryer, 2011; Rao, 2019), there is little evidence on how students' interactions within schools respond to such policies. Importantly, there is a concern that school integration benefits may be undermined if social interactions within schools remain segregated. My dissertation provides evidence on this gap by asking: what happens to students' social interactions when a desegregation policy forces socio-economic integration? Are low–income and wealthy students more likely to interact with one another? Moreover, if social interactions change, how does that reflect on academic achievement? To answer these questions, I study a natural experiment at an elite university that experienced a sharp and unexpected increase in its enrollment of low–income students. To measure social interactions, I assemble a novel dataset based on over a hundred million records of students' movements across campus as recorded by turnstiles guarding all campus entrances. I derive an indicator of students' interactions, which I validate against a social network survey. I combine these data with student-level records and implement a difference–in–differences approach that exploits the plausibly random variation in the share of low–income peers within degree programs (i.e., majors) and across cohorts.

The Returns to College for Low-income students: Evidence from a Student Loan Program in Colombia (co-authored with F. Sanchez and D. Perez) Draft

This paper examines the returns to college investments for low–income youth participating in a student loan program in Colombia. The loan’s policy setup plus the rules determining eligibility enable an instrumental variable research design that isolates exogenous changes in the number of college terms attained. Plus, the loan assignment rule allows examining individuals over all the distribution of academic achievement. First, we find the loan has a significantly positive impact on the probability of college enrollment, completion, and the cumulative number of college terms attained. Plus, the loan has a positive effect on average daily wages of 13 percent. Our estimates of the returns to college investments indicate that the average wage premium to an additional college term is 3.5 percent. Importantly, we find these returns are driven by achieving college completion, as students who do not earn a degree experience a return below 3 percent. Our findings suggest low–income students do experience significantly positive returns to college investments but that policies targeting low–income youth should place a strong emphasis on boosting college completion. This paper overcomes the limitations of prior research that has estimated returns to college education by either using natural experiments or by estimating effects at the margin of policy eligibility based on different rules.