Nicolás Badaracco

Job Market Paper

Time Investment Responses of Parents and Students to School Inputs (Job Market Paper)

Abstract: This paper studies the relationship between school and home investments in the cognitive development of children and the behavior of the actors involved in the process. I employ large-scale administrative and survey data from Chile to estimate how parents and children in primary and secondary school adjust their time investment in response to classroom and teacher quality. Since classroom inputs are not directly observed, I first estimate the production function for cognitive skills that provides measures of classroom and teacher quality. I then estimate the time investment responses to these quality measures. I find that parents of younger children compensate for low quality whereas parents of older children reinforce quality. Students, on the other hand, increase time self-investment in response to higher quality, but the responses are larger for older children. Motivated by the heterogeneity in responses by school grade, I estimate a child development model and characterize the optimal allocation of school resources across grades. I find that it is optimal to allocate relatively more resources to lower grades. Moreover, ignoring the behavioral response of households implies an optimal allocation with substantially lower improvements in cognitive development.

Working Papers

On-the-Job Training and Employer Asymmetric Learning

Gender-Based Pricing Prohibition in Health Insurance Markets

Female Labor Force Participation in Latin America: Evidence of Deceleration, with Leonardo Gasparini, Mariana Marchionni, and Joaquin Serrano, 2015,  CEDLAS-UNLP Working Paper.

Publications

Distributive Implications of Fertility Changes in Latin America, with Leonardo Gasparini and Mariana Marchionni, 2016, International Journal of Population Research.

Counterfactual Distributions in Bivariate Models—A Conditional Quantile Approach, with Javier Alejo, 2015, Econometrics.

Book Chapters

Characterizing female participation changes, with Leonardo Gasparini, Mariana Marchionni and Joaquin Serrano, 2015, In Leonardo Gasparini and Mariana Marchionni (eds.), Bridging Gender Gaps? The Rise and Deceleration of Female Labor Force Participation in Latin America. 

Work in Progress

Teacher Value-Added and Parental Perceptions of Teacher Quality

Gender and Peer Effects in the Workplace:  Evidence from Teachers

In-Kind Welfare Benefits and Recidivism Risk: Evidence from Medicaid (with Marguerite Burns and Laura Dague)