I’m a PhD candidate in Economics at the Vancouver School of Economics, University of British Columbia. My research covers education, gender, and development, using administrative data and field experiments. My job market paper, with Alejandra Quintana, studies what happens to students already enrolled when a Colombian single-sex school starts admitting both sexes. Girls’ test scores and college entry don’t change, but girls become 3.1 percentage points less likely to enter a STEM program and 1.9 points more likely to enter humanities and arts. I expect to graduate in summer 2027 and will be available for interviews in the 2026-27 job market.

Job Market Paper: The Effects of Coeducation on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Colombia. (with Alejandra Quintana)

Link: draft coming soon
Abstract: Between 2009 and 2023, 329 single-sex schools in Colombia began admitting students of both sexes: 215 girls’ schools and 114 boys’ schools. We study how this change affects the students already enrolled, using linked administrative records on school enrollment, the national exit exam, college, and formal employment. Converting schools were losing students before they switched, so we match each converter to never-converting schools of the same original sex and sector on pre-switch enrollment, test scores, and family background. We fix each school’s roster in the year before the switch and compare cohorts by their assigned years since the switch within matched sets. Within four years, the opposite-sex share rises by 22 to 24 percentage points in the school as a whole and by nine to ten points in Grade 11. Most of our evidence comes from girls’ schools. Girls’ test scores and college entry do not change, but their field of study does. Girls assigned to four years after the switch are 3.1 percentage points less likely to enter a STEM program and 1.9 points more likely to enter humanities and arts, and the decline is spread across health, the natural sciences, and other STEM fields. The shift appears even for girls whose own grade never mixed, which suggests that the change in the school as a whole matters. We find no effect on college completion or dropout where follow-up allows estimation. Evidence on formal employment and on the entry wages of chosen programs suggests a decline.

Learning from Peers, at Scale: Experimental Evidence from a Peer Tutoring Intervention in Bihar (with Palaash Bhargava, Madhavi Jha, Nikhil Kumar, Tarang Tripathi)

Link: draft available on request; pre-registration athttps://www.socialscienceregistry.org/trials/15527
Abstract: Altering classroom environments and leveraging peer networks show promise as some of the most cost-effective interventions targeting inputs in the education production function. Yet, the extent to which findings from prior small-scale studies generalize to typical education systems remains unclear. We evaluate this question through a peer tutoring intervention in government primary schools in Bhagalpur, Bihar, conducted with minimal external support and embedded within the noisy infrastructure characteristic of developing-country settings. The program involved 14,077 students in grades 3–5 across 176 schools, where high-performing students led daily small-group remedial math sessions. We find significant gains in math proficiency and reductions in math anxiety among learners. Classroom social networks became tighter and leaders became more central, suggesting broader effects on the learning environment. These results demonstrate that structured peer tutoring can be both effective and scalable, offering a viable pathway to improving foundational learning at scale in low-resource contexts.

Politicized Judiciary: Testing Evidence in India

Abstract: Does the rise of a Hindu-nationalist government influence judicial outcomes in India, particularly concerning the Muslim minority? Leveraging close election outcomes and the quasi-random assignment of judges to cases, this paper assesses whether defendant outcomes are affected by the assignment of defendants to a judge with similar religious identity in the presence of a pro-Hindu government. The findings suggest that the judiciary’s decisions remain largely unbiased on religious grounds, despite the Hindu-nationalist ideology of the government. This study contributes to the discourse on the independence of the judiciary in the politically charged context of India.

Agency over Earnings and Female Labor Supply (work in progress, with Diego Delic)

Abstract: work in progress

Centralised versus decentralised monitoring in developing countries: a survey of recent research (book chapter, with Farzana Afridi, Amrita Dhillon, Arka Roy Chaudhuri)

Link:https://press.lse.ac.uk/chapters/e/10.31389/lsepress.dlg.i
Abstract: NA

The chapter appears in Faguet and Pal (eds.), Decentralised Governance: Crafting Effective Democracies Around the World, LSE Press, 2023, pp. 235-269.

• President’s Academic Excellence Initiative Award, UBC
• International Tuition Award, UBC
• National Eligibility Test (NET) for Lectureship in Economics, UGC India
• Hiralal Bhargava Gold Medal, Delhi School of Economics (ranked 1st)
• Shri Ram Behari Rohatagi Memorial Gold Medal, Delhi School of Economics (best academic performance)
• K.C. Nag Memorial Prize, Delhi School of Economics
• EXIM Bank Scholarship, Delhi School of Economics

Grants: The Agency Fund with InvolveEDU ($350,000, 2024-26); CEGA-PEP Initiative ($9,200, 2024); Weiss Fund, University of Chicago ($10,500 in 2024, $4,500 in 2023); CEGA ($2,500, 2025).

• Head TA, Introduction to Microeconomics (BA), Fall 2026
• Intermediate Microeconomics (BA), Summer 2026, Fall 2022
• Microeconomics (MA), Fall 2025
• Economics of Technical Change (BA), Fall 2024, Fall 2023
• Labour Economics (BA), Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Spring 2022