Joaquín Paleo

Grades open doors to scholarships, graduate programs, and jobs, but distinguishing the effect of grades from the underlying ability they measure is hard. We study this question by implementing a Regression Discontinuity Design around grade-jump cutoffs at Uruguay’s main higher education institution, where a deterministic rule converts continuous course scores into coarser transcript grades. Marginally earning a higher first-semester grade raises next-semester GPA by 0.23 standard deviations. Because students observe both the score and the grade, the response reflects the transcript label rather than anything students learn about their own ability. In the labor market, monthly earnings at the first job show no detectable change. In contrast, hourly wages are 17 to 21 percent higher, while weekly hours worked are 2.2 to 2.8 hours lower. The wage premium fades quickly, but the hours reduction persists. These findings seem to be driven by within-sector changes, rather than students sorting across sectors with systematically different jobs. A higher grade also raises public-sector entry by 7 percentage points, where hiring rules score GPA explicitly. Finally, among students who start working after the grade is realized, we find evidence that academic performance improves in the semesters after the first job begins, relative to students who marginally earned a lower grade, which is consistent with them working fewer hours.

A large literature shows that positive shocks to local labor markets can discourage young workers from attending college by raising the opportunity cost of schooling. I ask whether unionization operates through the same channel by using data from NLRB representation elections and exploiting close elections, in which a union barely wins versus barely loses, as locally exogenous variation in the intensity of new unionization. Aggregating close-election outcomes to the county level following the regression-discontinuity-aggregation (RDA) framework, I estimate the effect of new unionization on college enrollment using institution-level enrollment data from IPEDS. An event-study design shows a sharp decline four to eight years after close-election union activity, specific to the public two-year sector. Additionally, I find that increased unionization reduces the local bachelor’s-degree share among men, with no effect on women. The results identify organized labor as a quantitatively meaningful determinant of local human-capital accumulation.

A student's rank among peers affects later achievement, but it is hard to disentangle why measures of relative performance might matter. In this paper we identify one component, the information a student receives about their relative standing. In our setting, course results are posted publicly as alphabetically ordered class rosters, so a student learns their own grade alongside the grades of their classmates. Two students earning the same grade in the same course, who happen to be surrounded by better or worse performing peers, see different signals about how well they did, for reasons unrelated to their own performance. Comparing such students, we find that earning the highest grade among one's nearest roster neighbours raises subsequent academic performance. The effect is unrelated to student characteristics, survives a randomization test that reshuffles roster order within each class, and is larger when a student outperforms a wider set of neighbours. These results show that information about relative performance, on its own, can affect students' future outcomes.

Through the first half of the twentieth century, Mexican-American students across the Southwest were routinely placed in separate and underfunded “Mexican schools”. Mendez v. Westminster (1947), the first federal ruling against school segregation in the United States, ended the practice in California. Using the 1940 and 1950 full-count censuses, I implement a triple-differences strategy that compares children in counties with high and low Hispanic shares, in California relative to neighboring states, before and after the ruling to identify the effects of mandated desegregation. Desegregation narrows the gap between Hispanic students’ expected and completed schooling and raises their junior high and high school completion rates. These results show that the consequences of desegregation appear within a few years of the ruling, not only in the long run.