“Peer Effects and Ethnicity in Uganda: Impacts of Coethnic and High-Ability Peers on University Performance”
Abstract
Empirical research has documented the negative impact ethnic diversity has on several political and economic outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa, including economic growth, political engagement, conflict, and contributions to public goods. However, we know relatively little about educational peer effects in such settings, which are generally characterized by high ethnic diversity and cross-ethnic mixing. This paper studies the effect of coethnic and high-ability peers in student groups on academic outcomes at a large public university in Uganda, a country with pronounced ethnic heterogeneity and segregation. I link data on student-level university admissions with subsequent grades. Upon admission, dorm assignments are random conditional on gender, providing exogenous variation in peer group formation. On average, high-ability peers (irrespective of ethnicity) and coethnic peers (irrespective of ability) positively affect a student’s performance. Whereas the coethnic peer effect disappears by the year of graduation, the high-ability peer effect persists and even increases in magnitude over time. The effect of high-ability coethnic peers on performance is statistically indistinguishable from that of high-ability noncoethnic peers. The results of heterogeneous effects analysis suggest that the entire coethnic peer effect is driven by students with little exposure to other ethnicities prior to enrolling at the university. The pattern of results is consistent with both psychological and peer-to-peer learning explanations that reflect the specific context of this study.
“The STEM Major Gender Gap: Evidence from Coordinated College Application Platforms Across Five Continents”
(with G. Artemov, A. Barrios-Fernández, A. Bizopoulou, M. Kaila, J. Liu, R. Megalokonomou, J. Montalbán, C. Neilson, S. Otero, J. Sun, and X. Ye)
Abstract
This paper examines the misalignment of training incentives, revealing how employer and worker motivations impact training decisions. Employers prioritize workers for training based on the firm’s ability to profit from their newly acquired skills, favoring older, long-tenured employees or relatives over younger, high-potential gains workers. Employers’ incentives contrast with workers’ preferences, which prioritize skill gains rather than employer profitability. We use a controlled environment allowing employers to reveal their preferred training choices from their workers. We also collect data on skill perceptions from employers to distinguish preference distortions from misperceptions. A field experiment assigning training spots to both employer-selected and high-demand workers finds that, despite the skills improvement (16% higher in treatment firms), productivity gains may be constrained by misaligned incentives.
Selected Works in Progress
“Is Affirmative Action the Answer to Gender Gap in STEM Majors?” (with Saloni Chopra)
“Beliefs and the Demand for Employee Training: A Field Experiment with Small Firms in Uganda” (with Andy Brownback, Sarojini Hirshleifer, and Arman Rezaee)
This study examines how employers select employees for training and employee demand for training. We incentive-compatibly elicit employers’ beliefs about which of their employees it would be socially optimal to train, as well as employers’ preferences over which of their employees they choose to train. We will then investigate if employers’ selection of workers is individually rational or driven by behavioral biases. Finally, we will measure employees’ self-selection into training and its alignment with employers’ selections. To ensure incentive compatibility of employer and employee choices, we provide employees from a sample of metalworking SMEs in Kampala, Uganda, with free, high-quality skills training. In addition, we conduct practical skills tests to measure employee metal working skills before and after training. AEA RCT registration (Baseline complete)
“Thou Must be a Doctor or an Engineer. Unintended Consequences of a Compulsory Science Policy” (with Tess Lallemant and Henry Joe Opio)
We study the effect of Uganda’s policy that made chemistry and physics compulsory in addition to biology and mathematics, which were already mandatory for all students in junior high school. We examine the impact of this policy on performance in national exams, the number of girls entering STEM fields at advanced levels, and the persistence of both boys and girls in STEM at university. Using test scores in national exams, university applications, and school-level registrations, our approach exploits pre-policy variation in the school-level share of candidates sitting for national chemistry and physics exams.
Pre-PHD Research
“The contribution of millennium development goals towards improvement in major development indicators, 1990–2015” (with Rati RaM) Applied Economics, 2018