Andres Barrios Fernandez

Ph.D. in Economics, LSE

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Welcome to my website! I am an Assistant Professor at the School of Business and Economics and the Director of the Human Development Lab at the Universidad de Los Andes. I am also an Associate at the Centre for Economic Performance at LSE, an Affiliate at the CEPR , and a Research Affiliate at IZA. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Economics at LSE in 2019, and completed a postdoc at the Department of Economics at MIT in 2022.

My research interests cover different topics in labor and public economics, but I primarily work on the economics of education. Through my research, I aim to contribute to understanding and tackling inequality on educational attainment and on access to opportunities.

News:

Published papers:

Neighbors' Effects on University Enrollment (AEJ: Applied Economics) #Data #Code
Last draft , Online Appendix

This paper provides causal evidence that close neighbors significantly influence potential applicants’ decision to attend university. I create a unique dataset combining detailed geographic information and individual educational records in Chile, and exploit the quasi-random variation generated by student loans eligibility rules. I find that potential applicants are significantly more likely to attend and complete university when their closest neighbor—-defined as the closest individual applying to university one year before—-becomes eligible for a student loan and enrolls in university. This increase in enrollment is mediated by an increase in the probability of taking the admission exam and applying to university. The closest neighbor typically lives 0.09 km away, and neighbors’ influence decays with distance. My results highlight the importance of social influences for university enrollment decisions and suggest that financial aid and university access policies may have important spillover effects.

O Brother, Where Start Thou? Sibling Spillovers on College and Major Choice in Four Countries (The Quarterly Journal of Economics) with A. Altmejd, M. Drlje, J. Goodman, M. Hurwitz, D. Kovac, C. Mulhern, C. Neilson and J. Smith.
Online Appendix , Summary Video

Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions but causal identification of those effects is notoriously challenging. Using data from Chile, Croatia, Sweden, and the United States, we study within-family spillovers in college and major choice across a variety of national contexts. Exploiting college-specific admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings’ college options, we show that in all four countries a meaningful portion of younger siblings follow their older sibling to the same college or college-major combination. Older siblings are followed regardless of whether their target and counterfactual options have large, small or even negative differences in quality. Spillover effects disappear, however, if the older sibling drops out of college, suggesting that older siblings’ college experiences matter. That siblings influence important human capital investment decisions across such varied contexts suggests that our findings are not an artifact of particular institutional detail but instead a more generalizable description of human behavior. Causal links between the postsecondary paths of close peers may partly explain persistent college enrollment inequalities between social groups and suggests that interventions to improve college access may have multiplier effects.

It's Time to Learn: School Institutions and Returns to Instruction Time (Economics of Education Review) with G.Bovini. #Data #Code

This paper investigates whether the effects of a reform that substantially increased daily instruction time in Chilean primary schools vary depending on school institutions. Focusing on incumbent students and exploiting an IV strategy, we find that longer daily schedules increase reading scores at the end of fourth grade and that the benefits are greater for pupils who began primary education in no-fee charter schools rather than in public schools. We provide evidence that these two types of publicly subsidized establishments, which cater to similar students but differ in their degree of autonomy, expand the teaching input in different ways: in order to provide the additional instruction time, no-fee charter schools rely more on hiring new teachers and less on increasing teachers’ working hours than public schools do.

Recidivism and Neighborhood Institutions: Evidence from the Rise of the Pentecostal Church in Chile (Forthcoming, Journal of Labor Economics) with Jorge Garcia-Hombrados
CEP Discussion Paper CEPR Discussion Paper

Rehabilitating convicted criminals is challenging; indeed, an important share of them returnto prison only a few years after their release. Thus, finding effective ways of encouraging crimedesistance, particularly among young individuals, has become an important policy goal to reducecrime and incarceration rates. This paper provides causal evidence that the local institutionsof the neighborhood that receives young individuals after prison matter. Specifically, we showthat the opening of an Evangelical church reduces twelve-months re-incarceration rates amongproperty crime offenders by more than 10 percentage points. This effect represents a drop of 16% in the probability of returning to prison for this group of individuals. We find smaller and less precise effects for more severe types of crime. We discuss three classes of mechanisms thatcould explain our results: social support, promotion of evangelical values, and social monitoring. We provide evidence that the social support provided by evangelical churches is an importantdriver of our findings. This suggests that non-religious local institutions could also play an important role in the rehabilitation of former inmates.

Peer Effects in Education (Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance).
Last draft

The identification of peer effects is challenging. There are many factors not related to social influences that could explain correlations among peers. This article discusses the main challenges for the identification of peer effects, describes some of the empirical strategies commonly used to overcome these challenges, and summarizes the main findings of the literature on peer effects in education. Peers have been shown to affect many important outcomes, including academic performance and educational trajectories. Confirming the existence of peer effects is important from a policy perspective. Both the cost-benefit analysis and the design of policies are likely to be affected by the existence of social spillovers. However, making general policy recommendations from the current evidence is not easy. The size of the peer effects documented in the literature varies substantially across settings and depending on how peers are defined and characterized. Understanding what is behind this heterogeneity is thus key to extract more general policy lessons. Access to better data and the ability to map social networks will likely facilitate investigating which peers and which characteristics matter the most in different contexts. Conducting more research on the mechanisms behind peer effects is also important. Understanding these drivers is key to take advantage of social spillovers in the design of new educational programs, to identify competing policies, and to gain a deeper understanding of the nature and relevance of different forms of social interactions for the youth.

Teacher Value Added and Gender Gaps on Educational Outcomes (Accepted, Economics of Education Review)
with Marc Riudavets
CEP Discussion Paper Last Draft

This paper uses rich administrative data from Chile to estimate teacher-value added (TVA) on test scores and on an index of educational attainment. We allow each teacher to have a different TVA for male and female students and show that differences in TVA explain an important part of the gender gaps we observe in test scores and in postsecondary education trajectories. We next exploit rich information on teaching practices and show that at least in terms of the practices we observe there do not seem to be important differences in what makes teachers effective for male and female students. We do find, however, significant associations between certain practices and teacher effectiveness, which suggest that some teaching strategies benefit all students independently of their gender. Finally, we also show that on average female teachers are more effective at teaching female students and that math teachers tend to be biased in favor of male students. Interestingly, teachers with smaller gender biases seem to be more effective for both, male and female students.

Submitted papers:

Elite Universities and the Intergenerational Transmission of Human and Social Capital (Accepted, American Economic Review) with C.Neilson and S.Zimmerman
Online Appendix CEP Discussion Paper CEPR Discussion Paper IZA Discussion Paper LSE Blog CEP Centre Piece Article Article in El Mercurio (Chilean Newspaper)

Do elite colleges help talented students join the social elite, or help incumbent elites retain their positions? We combine intergenerationally-linked data from Chile with a regression discontinuity design to show that, looking across generations, elite colleges do both. Lower-status individuals who gain admission to elite college programs transform their children’s social environment. Children become more likely to attend high status private schools and colleges, and to live near and befriend high-status peers. In contrast, academic achievement is unaffected. Simulations combining descriptive and quasi-experimental findings show that elite colleges tighten the link between social and human capital while decreasing intergenerational social mobility.

The Global Gender Gap in STEM Applications: Pipeline vs. Choice
with Isaac Ahimbisibwe, Adam Altjmed, Georgy Artemov, Aspasia Bizopoulou, Martti Kaila, Jin-Tan Liu, Rigissa Megalokonomou, José Montalbán, Christopher Neilson, Jintao Sun, Sebastián Otero, and Xiaoyang Ye
El Mercurio (Chilean Newspaper)

Women make up only 35% of global STEM graduates, a share unchanged for a decade. Using administrative data from ten centralized university admissions systems, we provide the first cross-national decomposition of the STEM gender gap into a pipeline gap (access and preparedness) and a choice gap (application decisions). The pipeline gap varies widely--from female disadvantage in Uganda to advantage in Sweden--yet the choice gap is strikingly consistent: even among top scorers, women are 25 percentage points less likely than men to apply to STEM. This stability across diverse contexts points to structural forces beyond local conditions.

Effects of Geographic Specialization on Police Effectiveness
with Jorge García-Hombrados and Daniel Pérez-Parra

This paper provides causal evidence that geographic specialization can significantly enhance police effectiveness. Using rich administrative and survey data from Chile, we examine a major reform that subdivided police operational areas--e.g., municipalities--into smaller zones known as quadrants. On average, each municipality was divided into seven quadrants, with officers permanently assigned to these territories to allow them to develop a deep understanding of their structure, crime patterns, and communities. By exploiting the staggered implementation of the reform across municipalities, we show that this reorganization enhanced police effectiveness along multiple dimensions. Among surveyed households, twelve-month victimization rates declined by 10 percentage points (36%). In line with this result, administrative records from the police reveal a 14% reduction in reported crime. The reform also enhanced public confidence: the share of households reporting high trust in police rose by 12 percentage points (30%), while those perceiving increased criminal activity fell by 15 percentage points (36%). Consequently, the share of households investing in private security measures decreased by 7.7 percentage points (37%). Evidence suggests these improvements stem from geographic specialization, as households in treated municipalities report both greater police presence and better police performance across multiple dimensions associated with a better knowledge of the quadrants and their communities.

Click here to see my working papers and ongoing projects.

Other writing:

Instruction Time and Educational Outcomes IZA World of Labor.
IZA Online Version

Recidivism and Neighborhood Institutions with Jorge García-Hombrados. Vox EU, CEPR.

Reprobado. Una Década Perdida en Educación. Capítulo sobre Liceos Bicentenario. (in Spanish) with Carolina Allende Labbé. Libertad y Desarrollo.

Instituciones Barriales y Reincidencia Criminal (in Spanish) with Jorge García-Hombrados. Nada es Gratis.

Trayectorias Educativas y Redes Sociales (in Spanish) Nada es Gratis.

References: