Published

With Claudia Hupkau and Antonio Roldán

Journal of Public Economics (2024)

We provide evidence from a randomized controlled trial on the effectiveness of a novel, 100-percent online math tutoring program, targeted at secondary school students from highly disadvantaged neighborhoods. The intensive, eight-week-long program was delivered by qualified math teachers in groups of two students during after-school hours. The intervention significantly increased standardized test scores (+0.26 SD) and end-of-year math grades (+0.48 SD), while reducing the probability of repeating the school year. The intervention also raised aspirations, as well as self-reported effort at school.

Paper

Published

With Andreu Arenas

SERIEs, Journal of the Spanish Economic Association (2024)

We use census data on external assessments in primary and secondary school in the Basque Country (Spain) to estimate learning losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2021, one year after school closures, which lasted from March to June 2020. Differences-in-differences with student and school-by-grade fixed effects show an average learning loss of 0.045 standard deviations, an effect which is smaller than short-run effects estimated by previous papers, and estimated after 6 months of one of the most successful school reopening campaigns among OECD countries. The effect is larger in Mathematics, moderate in Basque language, and none in Spanish language. Controlling for socioeconomic differences, learning losses are especially large in public schools, and also in private schools with a high percentage of low-performing students. On the other hand, we find a regression to the mean within schools, possibly due to a compressed curriculum during the whole period. Finally, we show that students’ with higher learning losses selfreport significantly worse levels of socio-emotional well- being due to the pandemic.

Paper

Published

With David Mayor and Jose Montalbán-Castilla
Economics of Education Review (2023)

Many countries use centralized school choice procedures to assign pupils to schools. To address excess demand for a particular school, ties are broken according to priority points granted based on various criteria, such as proximity to the school. Using a unique reform undertaken in Madrid (Spain), we estimate the impact of abolishing residence-based priorities on families’ school choices, the stated motivation for choosing a school, and the final school allocation. Utilizing several administrative datasets on school applications, we find that the reform increases families’ out-of-district school assignments and assignments to schools further away from their home address. Parents of immigrant children did not change their application behavior in the first years of the reform but caught up with natives three years after its implementation. Children generally accessed slightly better-performing schools, particularly those from lower-educated backgrounds.

Paper

Published

With David Martinez de Lafuente and Ainhoa Vega-Bayo
Teaching and Teacher Education (2022)

In this paper, we study the presence of systematic differences between teacher non-blind assessments and external blindly graded standardized tests as a measure of grading misalignment. Using a large administrative database covering two student cohorts (N = 31, 183 pupils) from publicly-funded schools in the Basque Country (Spain), we explore the grading gaps found between these two type of assessments for several student characteristics using fixed effects modeling. We find that, after controlling for standardized achievement, systematic teachers’ under-assessment exists for student groups that, on average, lag behind in school: boys, children from an immigrant background, and low SES students. The observed data patterns withstand several robustness checks, including the use of instrumental variables approach (IV) and other alternative regression specifications.

Paper

Published

With Sara de la Rica and Piotr Lewandowski
Labour Economics (2020)

This paper addresses the empirical relationship between job tasks and wages for a harmonised sample of 19 developed countries. We do so by using worker-level PIAAC data to account for task heterogeneity within occupations. Our contribution is threefold: First, we compute abstract, routine and manual task measures that are found to be well-validated visa-vis previous research. Second, we estimate task prices, and find that a one-standard-deviation increase in abstract tasks is related to a 3.3-log-point wage premium, whereas there is a 2.6 to 2.9-log-point wage penalty for each standard deviation of routine (manual) tasks. Development factors and labour market institutions, particularly union coverage and strictness of employment protection legislation, seem to play a role in the differences in all three task prices.

Paper

Working paper

Fedea Working Paper (2018/17)

Submitted

I study the sharp decline in performance experienced in 2015 by the Basque Country region (Spain) in secondary education student outcomes, as measured by the OECD’s PISA assessment. I construct a harmonized and comparable dataset for the Basque Country since 2003 and examine how differences in observable student and school characteristics have affected changes in student outcomes. Despite the economic crisis experienced by the Basque economy since 2008, the increase in socioeconomic characteristics of students slows down but does not decrease in 2015, hence having little effect on the decline in performance. Conversely, I find three factors that may help explain part of the decline in scores since 2009 and 2012 and which affect students across all the performance distribution: an increase of repeaters, an increase of students which take the test in a language different from their regular language at home, and the perceived increases by the school principals in student behavior problems at school. The results call for a cautious response and interpretation by public authorities given the low-stakes nature of the PISA test and the diversity of factors affecting the decline.

Paper