Job Market paper

“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.

Other Works

“Affirmative Action by Gender and its Impact on Preferences, Access, and Mismatch: Evidence from Uganda.” (with Saloni Chopra)

We study the effect of gendered affirmative action (AA) on university access in Uganda, a country with an evolving policy landscape. Since the 1990/91 academic year, Uganda instituted a gender-based AA policy, wherein female applicants to public universities are awarded an extra 1.5 points to their GPA to boost their chances of university entry. We use de-identified data on student applications, admissions, and college performance spanning 2009 to 2021 at Uganda’s largest university. The simple trends in the data show that male student applications and admissions to STEM majors are, on average, three times higher than those for females. Yet, the ratio is more balanced in non-STEM majors. We empirically test the impact of the policy on major choices and matching. More recently, in 2020, the university decided to employ the quota system, where 40% of the spots in STEM majors are reserved for girls, providing a unique setting to study the impact of quota and bonus point policy simultaneously. So we study the effect of both policies on matching, displacement, and pre-collegiate student preferences. (Data analysis stage)

“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.

Selected Works in progress

“Univeral Secondary Education”

Pre-PHD Research

“The contribution of millennium development goals towards improvement in major development indicators, 1990–2015” (with Rati RaM) Applied Economics, 2018