This study evaluates the effects of specialized educational programs for linguistic minorities, focusing on bilingual indigenous schools in Mexico, on academic performance in math and Spanish and on bullying. These schools aim to provide instruction in native languages and create safe spaces for minorities who often face discrimination; however, they encounter significant implementation challenges. I develop and estimate a structural model of parents choosing primary schools for their children that incorporates bullying as a key social interaction depending on the school ethnic composition and heterogeneous human capital formation technologies. I find that bullying consistently negatively impacts academic performance (by 0.15-0.38 standard deviations) and that increasing the proportion of indigenous students in a school from 0% to 100% reduces bullying for indigenous students by 7.3 percentage points, without affecting non-indigenous students. However, I find that teachers in indigenous schools are on average less effective than teachers in regular schools in promoting academic achievement. Their effectiveness is mediated by their indigenous language proficiency. Parental school choice is influenced both by academic aspirations and bullying concerns. I use the estimated model to evaluate counterfactual policies. Enhancing resources in indigenous schools improves academic scores and reduces bullying by encouraging student shifts from regular to indigenous schools. Policies targeting ethnic-based bullying improve academic performance directly and indirectly by fostering a conducive learning environment and encouraging students to choose more productive regular schools. Eliminating indigenous schools enhance academic achievement and reduce bullying for indigenous students attending regular schools, thanks to the influx of indigenous peers. Therefore, indigenous schools need additional resources to address minorities' education needs; otherwise, they risk being counterproductive.

The limited market size of many small emerging economies is a key constraint to the growth of innovative small and medium enterprises. Exporting offers a potential solution, but firms may struggle to locate and appeal to foreign buyers. We conducted a six-country randomized experiment with 225 firms in the Western Balkans to test the effectiveness of 30 h of live group-based training and 5 h of one-on-one remote consulting in overcoming these constraints. Treated firms used techniques such as search engine optimization and improved Facebook content to increase their digital presence and better reach foreign customers. A year later, we find positive and significant impacts on the number of customers, and a significant intensive margin increase in export sales. Qualitative interviews suggest this improvement came from a combination of sector-specific advice on market expansion, and through an encouragement effect which gave entrepreneurs the confidence to try new sales strategies.

The effect of demographic diversity on teamwork is often presented as a double-edged sword: more diverse teams benefit from more creativity and knowledge sharing, but they face higher communication and coordination costs. This paper tests this consensus view in the context of higher education. We exploit an experimental setting in a large undergraduate class, where students are randomly assigned to small homework groups, with varying levels of diversity in terms of race, gender, and place of birth. We find that more diverse groups perform better when the assigned task is creative and complex, and worse when the task is analytical, which confirms the consensus view that diversity's positive impact on team performance hinges on gains from creativity. We then address the effect of team diversity on coordination and communication, building an index of teamwork quality based on collaboration between members, the balance of member contributions, and the absence of conflicts. We find that diversity has a U-shaped effect on teamwork quality, regardless of the type of task performed. This result suggests that faultines – dividing lines that split a group into subgroups based on demographic characteristics – can cause inter-subgroup cohesion to break down, while very homogeneous or very heterogeneous groups collaborate better. The results help provide a framework to understand optimal team composition for institutions and organizations.

As countries expand English instruction to support global economic integration, concerns have emerged that such policies may erode indigenous languages and cultural identity. This paper examines this possibility using a natural experiment in Mexico, where six states introduced English programs in public primary schools during the 1990s. Leveraging a staggered difference-in-differences design with linked school and population censuses, we find that exposure to English instruction instead increased the likelihood of understanding and speaking an indigenous language by 1.2 and 0.7 percentage points, respectively, substantial effects given baseline rates of only 2.2% and 1.4%. Mechanism analysis reveals that these effects reflect ethno-linguistic reinforcement rather than cognitive spillovers or compositional changes, as evidenced by increased self-identification as indigenous (1.7 percentage points from a baseline of 8.3%). Our findings suggest that multilingual education can simultaneously promote economic integration while reinforcing cultural distinctiveness.

We study Mexico’s Bachelor’s Degree in Primary Education with an Intercultural Bilingual Focus (LEPIB), introduced in 2004 to increase the supply of formally qualified teachers in indigenous bilingual primary schools. We exploit its staggered rollout across states in a difference-in-differences event-study design using school census and national test data. LEPIB increased the number of bachelor’s-degree teachers in indigenous schools by 0.3 per school by 2015 (about two additional qualified teachers per municipality), with no detectable change in teacher-pupil ratios, nor in wages, indicating a shift in teacher composition rather than class size. This increase in qualifications translated into achievement gains of 0.14 SD in Mathematics and 0.17 SD in Spanish. Using a unique dataset of survey responses from students and parents, we find that higher teacher qualifications improved perceived classroom practices, especially teacher support, alongside suggestive evidence of declines in parental engagement consistent with household substitution. Using population census, we find longer-run effects for exposed cohorts: higher employment among indigenous women (2.9-3.3 pp), lower fertility on the intensive margin (0.17-0.18 fewer children conditional on having any), and higher Spanish bilingualism among indigenous-language speakers (1.8-3.2 pp); these effects are concentrated in linguistically homogeneous communities.

Can harmonising school curricula across ethnic lines improve learning outcomes and reduce segregation in deeply divided post-conflict societies? I study this question in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where cantons adopted a Common Core Curriculum (CCC) at different times between 2004 and 2025. Exploiting the staggered adoption of harmonised curricula across cantons, I use a difference-in-differences design applied to two waves of TIMSS data (2019 and 2023, grade 4). CCC adoption is associated with significant improvements in mathematics achievement of 0.27-0.36 standard deviations and science achievement of 0.29-0.38 SD, with effects robust across two-way fixed effects and Callaway-Sant'Anna estimators; effects are even larger (0.48-0.54~SD) when restricting to panel schools observed in both waves. Effects are concentrated among Bosniak students (0.41~SD), who had lower baseline achievement; Croat students show positive but imprecisely estimated gains. Effects are present for both genders, across the performance distribution, and across all content and cognitive domains, including reasoning subscales that require substantial reading comprehension. Suggestive dose-response evidence indicates that each additional year of CCC exposure is associated with approximately 0.10~SD gains ($p < 0.07$). Teacher-reported instructional time data reveal a plausible mechanism: treated cantons reallocate significantly more time to physical science ($+14.8$~pp, $p = 0.01$) and life science ($+14.0$~pp, $p = 0.09$), consistent with the CCC reducing the curricular burden of ethnically divisive subjects. I find suggestive evidence of improved perceptions of school safety and marginally significant shifts toward student-centred instructional practices, but no significant effects on teacher-reported school-level outcomes. Parent satisfaction and principal-reported discipline are both unaffected, and null results on classroom disorder, instructional clarity, and teacher well-being suggest the reform operates primarily through curricular content changes. An apparent increase in school-level linguistic segregation is a sampling composition artifact: within-school ethnic composition is unchanged in panel schools ($p = 0.97$). The results are robust to leave-one-canton-out sensitivity, COVID-19 closure controls, Goodman-Bacon decomposition (confirming a clean' DiD), and Benjamini-Hochberg multiple testing correction. Because no prior TIMSS cohort at the same grade level is available, I assess the parallel trends assumption indirectly using four waves of the Life in Transition Survey (2006-2023) and PISA 2018, which show no differential pre-trends between treated and control cantons. The results suggest that curriculum harmonisation can meaningfully improve learning in post-conflict settings without harming school climate or altering school-level ethnic composition.

Financial stress is widespread among college students, yet little is known about how financial hardship shapes peer interactions in collaborative settings. We study this question using a field experiment in which students are randomly assigned to small groups for collaborative homework in a large undergraduate economics course, where approximately 40% of students in our sample report daily financial stress. We document three findings. First, financially stressed students collaborate significantly less with their teammates. Second, this collaboration deficit is partially closed when financially stressed students are paired with other financially stressed peers. Third, and most importantly, this re-engagement represents what we term a “low-effort coordination equilibrium”: financially stressed students paired together report higher experiential collaboration, yet they learn less from each other and produce lower-quality group output—without reporting more conflict or free-riding, consistent with mutual agreement on reduced effort. The penalty is specific to collaborative work; individual exam performance is unaffected. While financially stressed students are substantially more likely to hold jobs, replacing peer financial stress with peer employment status in the interaction specification produces no coordination failure, and when both interactions are included simultaneously, the financial stress channel fully absorbs the employment channel— suggesting that financial hardship carries a psychological burden beyond time constraints alone. These findings reveal a previously unexplored social channel through which financial stress may perpetuate disadvantage: while a large literature has documented the individual cognitive costs of financial scarcity, we show that financial stress also acts as a social multiplier, undermining coordination in team settings and generating aggregate costs larger than individual-level estimates indicate.

This paper investigates the impact of workplace harassment on various occupational outcomes, utilizing a novel empirical approach that combines reduced-form strategies with a structural equilibrium framework. Leveraging a newly available dataset from the collaboration between the Census Bureau and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), this study provides an unprecedented analysis of harassment claims across firms of varying sizes and industries. By exploiting sharp thresholds in Title VII coverage and the diffusion of the #MeToo movement, we employ regression discontinuity designs and event studies to estimate the causal effects of vicarious liability on firm demographics, wage gaps, and employee turnover. We then exploit the findings in a structural model that estimates a job market equilibrium. The newly integrated Census-EEOC data product, which has not been used in prior research offers new insights into the economic implications of workplace harassment.