Becoming a Teacher: Experimental Evidence from an Information Intervention

with Mariana Alfonso, Matías Busso, Hugo R. Ñopo, and Antonella Rivera

International Journal of Educational Development, Vol. 118, October 2025

Education systems seeking to improve outcomes must attract, develop, and retain highly effective teachers. A critical challenge is making the teaching profession appealing to talented youth. This paper presents evidence from an experiment in Peru, where we provided high school seniors with information about recent reforms to the teaching career. We find positive, though modest, effects on both the intensive and extensive margins: treated students were more likely to choose an education major and to enroll in higher education. While the intervention increased the number of prospective teachers, it did not substantially alter the profile of those entering the profession. These findings suggest that career incentives and information can influence students’ decisions, though broader changes to the composition of the future teaching workforce may require additional, complementary interventions.

The Price of Faith: Economic Costs and Religious Adaptation in Sub-Saharan Africa

with Eduardo Montero and Dean Yang

Revise and resubmit, The Quarterly Journal of Economics

How do religious groups adapt when the economic cost of adherence rises? We provide causal evidence that they adapt along three margins simultaneously: contracting in membership, softening enforced strictness, and expanding compensatory services. We study the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Church in Sub-Saharan Africa, which prohibits production of tobacco, coffee, and tea. The interaction of agro-ecological suitability with global export prices generates exogenous variation in the opportunity cost of SDA membership across nearly 200 sub-national localities from 1991 to 2022. When these costs rise, SDA membership growth declines; local churches expand educational and health institutions; and survey evidence shows reduced emphasis on healthy-living prescriptions alongside higher member consumption of prohibited goods. Among stayers, satisfaction and commitment fall, against predictions of strict-church models. Economic incentives affect not only individuals' church membership choices, but simultaneously religious groups' investment and doctrinal emphasis decisions as well; our findings shed new light on religious group adaptation to new economic environments.

The Roots of Faith: Early Life Droughts and Religious Commitment in Africa

June 2026

Can adverse environmental shocks durably shape religious life? Combining individual-level data from three Afrobarometer rounds across 37 African countries with over a century of high-resolution drought data, I exploit variation in drought exposure across birth cohorts within localities and find that individuals exposed to stronger droughts are more likely to be members of a religious group, while their religious affiliation is unchanged. While a short-run effect is present for adults of all ages, the persistent, long-term impact is driven specifically by exposure during the formative teenage years. This effect is concentrated among individuals who demonstrably grew up where they are observed — those living in their ethnic homeland or among their own ethnic group — and teenage drought does not predict who stays, ruling out migratory sorting. The estimate is robust to locality-specific cohort trends, which also remove the one placebo failure in the design, and to randomization inference that reassigns entire drought histories across localities. The response is specific to religious institutions: secular community groups respond only at the threshold of adulthood and more weakly, and trust in state and traditional authorities does not move. Consistent with religious groups providing informal insurance, the effect is concentrated in poorer countries and is equally strong where droughts are rare and where they are common, suggesting little adaptation. The results identify a demand-side channel through which climate volatility builds durable religious institutions.

An Invitation to Apply: A Gender Quota in Centralized College Admissions

Draft in preparation

Women are about a third of STEM graduates worldwide, despite outnumbering men in higher education overall. In 2024 Chile added women-only seats on top of regular capacity at hundreds of STEM programs in its national centralized admission system ("Más Mujeres Científicas"). A quota is designed to act on the supply of seats; here the shortage was of applicants, and the seats worked largely as information. Using administrative records of the universe of applications, assignments and enrollment for 2014–2026 and a difference-in-differences design, I find that women's share of applications to covered programs rose by 1.87 percentage points, a response to the announcement rather than to better admission chances: it appears also among women whose chances did not change, is absent where identical seats were merely re-announced, and the change in admission chances alone predicts at most a quarter of it. In the first year 47.5% of the reserved seats were awarded and 42% of covered programs awarded none, for lack of an eligible woman below the cutoff. The missing applications trace to field choice rather than aspirations: conditional on expecting a university degree, girls apply to university more than boys yet reach STEM admission at 41% of the boys' rate. Recomputing the assignment without the reserves, the filled seats placed 597 additional women in STEM with no student made worse off; men are 63% of those who gain through the resulting vacancy chains, and the women admitted stay at least as often as comparable admits. Where the seats go matters more than how many there are: the same seats placed where eligible women were waiting would have placed about 1.5 times as many women, and open seats less than half as many per seat used.

University of Michigan

University of Michigan

Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María

Universidad de Chile