WORKS IN PROGRESS

Digital Empowerment for Youth: Experimental Evidence from India (with Lena Song and Mridul Joshi) Conditionally Accepted at Journal of Development Economics via pre-results review

Concerns about the impacts of smartphones and social media have risen alongside their surging use in developing countries. One potential solution is educational interventions that encourage users to optimize their interactions with digital technologies. We co-created a multi-week, evidence-based digital empowerment curriculum designed to expand students’ ability to exert deliberate control over their use of social media and smartphones. We implement this curriculum with college students in India as a classroom-based course and as a text message-based course. Using a randomized controlled trial, we evaluate both versions of the curriculum and estimate the effects of exposure to the curriculum on social media consumption, mental health, misinformation discernment, sleep and concentration, and academic outcomes.

Status: In the field.

Reshaping Beliefs about Ourselves and Others: Experimental Evidence from Civil Servants in Pakistan (with Daniel Chen, Sultan Mehmood, Shaheen Naseer) (AEA RCT Registry)

Information frictions on the knowledge of one’s impact can stymie civil servant motivation for the well-being of individuals they serve. We study this idea through a field experiment with public school teachers in Pakistan that provided different forms of information about teacher value-added. We find that a psychosocial intervention—emphasizing the malleability of student intelligence—shifts teachers’ beliefs in meaningful ways: it improves growth mindset of teachers, and reduces stereotypes about first-generation learners as measured using Implicit Association Test. By contrast, exposure to narratives about teacher influence or to empirical evidence on teacher value-added yields no detectable shifts in implicit stereotypes. Finally, students taught by teachers who received the growth mindset intervention show significant gains in learning outcomes, with improvements of 0.15 SD in mathematics, 0.19 SD in English, and 0.19 SD in Urdu relative to the control group. In contrast, the narrative and evidence interventions produce small and statistically insignificant effects on student achievement.

Status: Draft coming soon.

Parental Information and Investments in Children’s Human Capital

This paper tests whether parents’ beliefs about their child’s performance shape how much they invest in the child’s human capital. I investigate this relationship using 16 years of panel data from India encompassing objective ability measures (e.g. test scores), subjective parental assessments, and investments. In the first part of the paper, I document that, conditional on true performance, parents’ prior beliefs correlate strongly with high stakes long-run investments—such as the decision to enroll in private school. This link intensifies with age, as children progress from primary to secondary school. In the second part of the paper, I exploit an exogenous shock (based on rainfall) that raises the opportunity cost of schooling—leading to a decrease in average school enrollment. I test whether parental beliefs mediate this effect—with parents who perceive their children to be of higher ability more willing to pay the opportunity cost of keeping their children in school, compared to children of lower perceived ability. This paper aims to offer the first piece of empirical evidence on the impact of parental beliefs on long-run human capital investments.

Here is the link to the first part of the paper establishing that parental perceptions of children’s performance predict parental investment in child human capital.

Presentations: AEFP Conference, Eastern Economic Association (EEA) Conference