Knowledge that Transforms

Increasing mother’s labor supply during a child’s preschool years may reduce time investments, yielding a negative direct effect on midchildhood and teenage outcomes. But as mother’s work hours increase, income will rise. Can income compensate for the negative effect of hours? Our mediation analysis exploits exogenous variation in both mother’s hours and family income. Results suggest a negative, insignificant direct effect from increasing mother’s hours on child test scores. However, the positive mediating effect of income creates a positive total effect on test scores (26% of a standard deviation) for a 10-hour increase in mother’s weekly hours in preschool years.

This paper studies learning among coworkers when incentives change. We use a simple principal-agent model to show that when workers are not fully informed on the global shape of the production function, (1) their effort choice changes over time as information is disclosed and processed and (2) changing incentives can trigger this learning process. We test this prediction using personnel data from an egg production plant in Peru. Exploiting a sudden change in the contract parameters, we find that workers learn from each other over the shape of the production function. This adjustment process is costly for the firm.

We study how active labor market policies affect the exchange of information and support among job seekers. Leveraging a unique social network survey in Ethiopia, we find that a randomized job search assistance intervention reduces information sharing and support between treated job seekers and their active job search partners. Because of lower job search support, untreated individuals search less and, suggestively, have worse employment outcomes. These results are consistent with a model of networks where unemployed individuals form job search partnerships to exploit the complementarities of job search.

We propose a model of intergenerational transmission of education wherein children belong to either highly educated or low-educated families. Children choose the intensity of their social activities, while parents decide how much educational effort to exert. Using Add Health data, we find that, on average, children’s homophily acts as a complement to the educational effort of highly educated parents but as a substitute for the educational effort of low-educated parents. We also find that policies that subsidize kids’ socialization efforts can backfire for low-educated students because they tend to increase their interactions with other low-educated students.

We estimate the effect of an unexpected institutional financial aid (IFA) award on student outcomes using administrative data collected from nine universities, exploiting variation in IFA schedules within and across university-entry cohorts. Each £1,000 of IFA during the first year of college increases the chances of completing that year by 1.4 percentage points, improves test scores by 0.059 standard deviations, and increases the chances of graduating with a good degree by 3.4 percentage points. We find that high-ability and low-income students benefit the most and calculate outcome-maximizing and cost-minimizing IFA schedules for each university.

Social and emotional learning (SEL) programs that target disruptive students aim to improve their classroom behavior. Small-scale programs in high-income countries have demonstrated positive effects. Using a randomized experiment, we show that a nationwide SEL program in Chile has no effect. Very disruptive students seem to reduce the program’s effectiveness. With attention deficit hyperactivity disorder being more prevalent in middle- than high-income countries, very disruptive students may be more present there, which could diminish the effectiveness of SEL programs. Moreover, implementation fidelity seems lower in this program than in the small-scale ones considered earlier, which could also explain the program’s null effect.

We investigate how sizes of professional networks affect the probability of appointment to a supervisory board and whether the effect is gendered. Using an employer-employee data set of the Danish labor market, 1995–2011, we find larger networks to associate with a higher probability of becoming a first-time director. The effect is larger for men. One explanation is that men, compared with women, have more connections to larger and listed firms and to other males—attributes that increase the appointment probability. Women who have connections to incumbent directors before being appointed director have more labor market experience than other directors.

We investigate the impact on work absences of a large reduction in paid sick leave benefits in Spain. Our results highlight substantial decreases in frequency (number of spells) mostly offset by increases in duration (length of spells). Overall, the policy did reduce the number of days lost to sick leave. For some, however, return to work was premature, as we document large increases in both the proportion of relapses and the number of working accidents. Displacement toward this unaffected benefit scheme cancels out almost two-fifths of the gains in terms of estimated absence reductions from the sick leave benefit cut.

Using a natural experiment induced by COVID-19, we test how the sudden absence of fans at football games impacts player performance in Italy. We find that African players, who are most commonly targeted by racial harassment, play better when fans are no longer at the stadium. A similar, albeit weaker, effect is detected among black players. Using official records of racist behavior by fans, we show that performance improves the most on teams that were subject to abuse before the lockdown. Our evidence suggests that racist pressure can harm discriminated groups and lower the overall quality of the game.