Esteban M. Aucejo

• Professor (Assistant) at Arizona State University

In order to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education, we surveyed approximately 1,500 students at one of the largest public institutions in the United States using an instrument designed to recover the causal impact of the pandemic on students’ current and expected outcomes. Results show large negative effects across many...

We estimate a sequential model of schooling to assess the major contributing factors to the large gender imbalance in educational attainment within racial groups. First, we find that differences between males and females in measures of early behavior account for the majority of the gender gap for each racial group. Second, we show that black males...

While instructional time is viewed as crucial to learning, little is known about the effectiveness of reducing absences relative to increasing the number of school days. Using administrative data from North Carolina public schools, this paper jointly estimates the effect of absences and length of the school calendar on test score performance. We ex...

This paper examines the problem of identification and inference on a conditional moment condition model with missing data, with special focus on the case when the conditioning covariates are missing. We impose no assumption on the distribution of the missing data and we confront the missing data problem by using a worst case scenario approach. We c...

This paper examines sorting into interracial friendships at selective universities. We show significant friendship segregation, particularly for blacks. Indeed, blacks'' friendships are no more diverse in college than in high school, despite the fact that the colleges that blacks attend have substantially smaller black populations. We demonstrate t...

The low number of college graduates with science degrees -- particularly among under-represented minorities -- is of growing concern. We examine differences across universities in graduating students in different fields. Using student-level data on the University of California system during a period in which racial preferences were in place, we sho...

Proposition 209 banned the use of racial preferences in admissions at public colleges in California. We analyze unique data for all applicants and enrollees within the University of California (UC) system before and after Prop 209. After Prop 209, minority graduation rates increased by 4.35 percentage points. We present evidence that certain instit...

Teacher e¤ectiveness is generally characterized by a single e¤ect that is common across stu-dents. However, educators are multi-task agents that choose how to allocate their e¤orts among pupils. Some teachers may target their courses towards the top students in the class while others to the bottom, leading to di¤erent complementarity e¤ects. Moreov...

If a¢ rmative action results in minority students at elite schools having much potential but weak preparation, then we may expect minority students to start o¤ behind their majority counterparts and then catch up over time. Indeed, at the private university we analyze, the gap between white and black grade point averages falls by half between the s...

We argue that once we take into account the students' rational enrollment decisions, mismatch in the sense that the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action admission policies are made worse off ex ante can only occur if selective universities possess private information. Ex ante mismatch occurs when revelation of this information would have ch...

We argue that once we take into account the students'rational enrollment decisions, mis- match in the sense that the intended bene…ciary of a¢ rmative action admission policies are made worse ocould occur only if selective universities possess private information about stu- dents'post-enrollment treatment eects. This necessary condition for mismatc...