Children growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods tend to perform significantly worse in school compared to children growing up under more favorable circumstances. We examine the impact of a three-year program ("Coaching for Teaching") targeted at ten poorly performing lower secondary schools...

Using administrative data, I track the path of all the secondary school graduates in Colombia from 2002 to 2012 that enter higher education and/or the formal labor market (5.4 million graduates). I compare graduates within the same secondary school and cohorts to estimate the premium of higher...

This study examines the effects of super-fast internet connections on the academic achievement of students in upper secondary school. We link detailed register data on around 250,000 students to local levels of access to optic fiber broadband and estimate the effect of broadband on student GPA....

In this paper we investigate whether human capital accumulation, during adolescence, depends on home investments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) equipment. Using micro-level data, for children aged 17-18 years old, drawn from the Greek part of the European Union Statistics on...

This dissertation consists of four distinct empirical essays that address various aspects of the economics of education. Chapters 2 and 3 show that patience and risk-taking as intertemporal preferences are closely related to differences in student achievement across and within countries. Chapter...

This paper examines the overall long-term effects of the Two Control Zones policy, implemented by the Chinese government to reduce air pollution, on children's human capital development. Estimates show that exposure to this policy, during the year of birth, is associated, 15 years later, with an...

This paper examines the effects of mineral extraction on human capital formation in Colombia, a country rich in natural resources but struggling with low college attendance, high youth unemployment, and high informality in the labor market. Leveraging the allocation of natural resources as a...