PhD thesis defence by Adriano De Falco
This thesis is composed of three essays.
In the first chapter, titled Grants vs. Loans: the Role of Financial Aid in College Major Choice, co-authored with Yannick Reichlin, we use a regression-discontinuity design around a test score cutoff for grant eligibility in Chile to understand channels through which financial aid shapes students’ major choices. We find that students are more likely to choose STEM fields. Estimating a discrete choice model around the cutoff, we provide evidence that this effect is driven by grants acting as an insurance mechanism against uncertainty about degree completion.
In the second chapter, Recruiting Better Teachers? Evidence from a Higher Education Reform in Chile , co-authored with Sofia Sierra Vasquez and Benjamin Hattemar, we analyze the impact of a reform in Chile introduced to attract better students into the teaching profession. We construct teacher value-added measures in test scores as a proxy for teaching quality and analyze how teaching quality changed, whether the reform attracted high/low productivity teachers, and the role of intrinsic motivation in explaining these effects. We find that the reform increased value-added of mathematics teachers, especially in more disadvantaged schools. We show that this is partially due to the selection of better students, while part of the remaining increase is attributable to some newly hired teachers being more intrinsically motivated.
In the third chapter, Sibship Size and Leaving the Parental Home co-authored with Elia Moracci and Alberto Venturin, we investigate whether the number of siblings an individual grows up with influences the speed at which s/he leaves the nest. We use data from two large representative European surveys and exploit twin birth at second parity as an exogenous source of variation for sibship size. We show that an additional sibling speeds up the process of independent living. We provide evidence that the main mechanism is a decrease in the value of intergenerational coresidence implied by having an extra sibling.
The event will take place in hybrid modality.