with Nério Simão Cá

The opportunity cost of mothers' time in rural areas in developing countries fluctuates sharply with the agricultural calendar, yet standard childcare program design implicitly assumes it is constant throughout the year. This paper studies how agricultural seasonality shapes mothers' demand for formal childcare and whether the resulting seasonal fluctuations in willingness to pay can help explain why childcare markets remain limited despite demand for these services. We implement a randomized controlled trial in Guinea-Bissau, expanding preschool hours from half-day to full-day during the cashew harvest season, the most economically important period for rural households, and evaluate the effects on women's employment, time-use, and well-being. We also use the program to elicit mothers' willingness to pay for childcare at different points in the agricultural year.

with Mauricio Romero

In this paper, we study the impact of an at-scale school pay-for-performance program with a rank-order tournament structure in Mexico. Public schools were grouped by observable characteristics, and the highest-performing schools on a standardized test in their group received a bonus to be divided between the principal and teachers. Leveraging idiosyncratic variation in the school’s distance to the bonus threshold, we identify the program’s heterogeneous effects on students’ academic performance. Contrary to what we expected (higher effects for schools closer to the threshold), preliminary results indicate that schools further away — ranked lower in their group — experience larger test score gains. These results are similar to those found in low-stakes accountability programs that publish school rankings.

This paper studies how targeting a consumption benefit by school location affects student sorting between public and private schools. When governments allocate subsidies based on location rather than by household, families may trade off school quality to access this benefit, potentially pushing students toward lower-quality schools. We study this using Peru's Qali Warma school meal program, where public primary schools in the poorest local districts receive lunch while schools in less poor districts do not.