Laia Navarro-Sola

Welcome to my website. I am an Assistant Professor at the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University. I am also a CESifo Reserch Network affiliate and a J-PAL invited researcher.

I study the provision of education and human capital development at the post-primary level, focusing on underprivileged populations in both developing and developed countries. My research often investigates the labor market returns of acquired skills and the role of educational technologies in fostering relevant human capital.

You can view my CV here.

PUBLICATIONS

What is a Good School, and Can Parents Tell? Evidence on the Multidimensionality of School Output

with Diether W. Beuermann, C. Kirabo Jackson, and Francisco Pardo

The Review of Economic Studies, vol. 90(1), pp 65–101. January 2023.

Published article (Open access)

Media: VoxDev, Caribbean Dev Trends (IDB), Nada es Gratis (Spanish)

Abstract: To explore whether schools’ causal impacts on test scores measure their overall impact on students, we exploit plausibly exogenous school assignments and data from Trinidad and Tobago to estimate the causal impacts of individual schools on several outcomes. Schools’ impacts on high-stakes tests are weakly related to impacts on important outcomes such as arrests, dropout, teen motherhood, and formal labour market participation. To examine if parents’ school preferences are related to these causal impacts, we link them to parents’ ranked lists of schools and employ discrete-choice models to infer preferences for schools. Parents choose schools that improve high-stakes tests even conditional on peer quality and average outcomes. Parents also choose schools that reduce criminality and teen motherhood and increase labour market participation. School choices among parents of low-achieving students are relatively more strongly related to schools’ impacts on non-test-score outcomes, while the opposite is true for parents of high-achieving students. These results suggest that evaluations based solely on test scores may be misleading about the benefits of school choice (particularly for low-achieving students), and education interventions more broadly.

WORKING PAPERS

Scaling Education to Marginalized Populations: Long-Run Impacts of Technology-Aided Schools

with Raissa Fabregas

CESifo Working paper, no. 11779 (March 2025)

Under review

[UPDATED!] March 2025: Latest version, CESifo Working paper No. 11779

Note: This paper is the result of merging two independent projects: “Secondary Schools with Televised Lessons: The Labor Market Returns of the Mexican Telesecundaria” (Navarro-Sola, 2021) and “Broadcasting Human Capital? The Long-Term Effects of Mexico’s Telesecundarias” (Fabregas, 2021). This paper supersedes all prior versions, including a version titled “Broadcasting Education at Scale: Long-Term Labor Market Impacts of Television-Based Schools”.

Abstract: Millions of children worldwide remain out of school due to the high costs of reaching them and a shortage of qualified teachers. Can ICT-based instruction help close this gap and deliver the long-term benefits of traditional schooling? This paper provides causal evidence on the long-term educational and labor market effects of using ICT to expand last-mile access to post-primary education. We focus on Mexico's TV-schools --physical lower secondary schools that replace most on-site teachers with televised instruction-- one of the largest formal mass media-based education models globally, serving over 1.4 million children every year. Exploiting nationwide geographic variation and cohort exposure to TV-school openings during 1980-2000, we find that high exposure to TV-schools increased lower secondary graduation by 8 percentage points, educational attainment by 0.4 years, and it led to a long-term 8% increase in hourly earnings. We show evidence that most TV-school students would have otherwise remained out of school, and that the labor market returns from additional schooling are comparable to those from standard secondary schools. The program benefits both agrarian and more economically diversified areas, with those in the latter experiencing three times higher earning gains. Our findings show that low-tech, scalable educational models can be a cost-effective way to generate significant labor market returns in underserved regions, even before high-tech solutions become widespread.

Lowering Barriers to Remote Education: Experimental Impacts on Parental Responses and Learning

with Emily Beam and Priya Mukherjee

Under review

[UPDATED!] November 2024: Latest version. Older versions: IZA Discussion Paper No. 15596, HCEO Working Paper 2022-030

Abstract: We conducted a field experiment in Bangladesh to investigate how parents adjust educational investments in response to three interventions to improve remote education access: information about an educational technology (EdTech) tool, an internet data package, and teacher phone support. These interventions influenced parental time and economic investments, which helps explain the observed effects we see on learning – providing EdTech information improved math scores by 0.15 SD., likely due to increased spending on tutoring. These effects were also stronger among wealthier households. The other interventions had no impacts on learning.

SELECTED WORK IN PROGRESS

The Impact of Formative Assessment of Behavior-Based Socioemotional Skills on Students' Outcomes

with Caterina Calsamiglia, Giacomo de Giorgi, and Ece Yagman

Data collection completed. Analysis stage.

Abstract: It is widely recognized that social and personal skills (i.e., perseverance, motivation, teamwork, etc.) are highly predictive of life achievements and long-term well-being, such as lower levels of school dropout, physical and mental health issues, and conflict. It is also well established that a comprehensive integration of these non-cognitive skills in the educational curriculum is essential to make lifetime progress. The objective of this trial is to test the causal impact of training and mentoring teachers to integrate formative assessment of socioemotional skills in the classroom with the help of digital tools on students’ academic and non-cognitive outcomes. Formative assessment implemented by the trained teachers involves the observation, recording, and provision of feedback on a specific set of behaviors, the so-called Pentabilities, that characterize socioemotional skills in active classroom environments. The teachers are given 5-6 months to implement the intervention. The trial involves 40 Catalan secondary schools that mainly serve at-risk populations.

Improving Labor Market Matching through Soft Skills Development in Technical Education

with Emily Beam, Ricardo Dahis, and Ursula Mello

Full RCT funded. Piloting stage.

Abstract: his project addresses the challenge of integrating soft skills into Technical Vocational and Education Training (TVET) programs to improve youth employability and labor market matching in industrial occupations. In partnership with SENAI, Brazil's largest TVET provider, we aim to understand whether technology can enhance the scalability of soft skills development. The intervention is a novel methodology targeting soft skills through behavior-based assessment and feedback provision with the help of digital tools.

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