We study the impact on cognitive and non-cognitive skills of exposure high achievers, using a unique experiment from Ecuador. Within each school, students were randomly assigned to classrooms in every grade between Kindergarten and 6th grade. Therefore, the proportion of peers who are high achievers varies across grades and classrooms because of their (random) peer composition. We find that exposure to high achievers reduces test scores in Math, Language, and Executive Function. The results also suggest that male students only affect their male peers, while female students affect both female and male peers. Additionally, we find that the effects of high achievers are concentrated on those in the top quintile of the test score distribution from the previous year. Finally, as with other school inputs, Kindergarten peers have stronger effects but fade-out over time. Contemporary exogenous changes in peer composition do not appear to affect non-cognitive skills.

This paper explores the impact of exposure to violence during the first nine years of life on risky health behaviors and socioemotional skills as a teenager. In Colombia, over 2 million children have experienced violence, but the medium-term consequences on risky health behaviors and socioemotional skills are not well understood. Using data from the Colombian Longitudinal Survey and administrative data at the municipality level, I leverage the within-municipality cross-cohort variation to study how exposure to terrorist attacks affects risky health behaviors and socioemotional skills. My findings suggest that exposure to terrorist attacks is associated with a 5.23% increase in the probability of drinking and a 5.1% increase in the total socioemotional difficulties experienced, driven by the hyperactivity scores (4.94%). These results shed light on the potential long-term consequences of violence on health and well-being, suggesting that the economic costs of violence are high.

In this document we analyze the impacts of a large-scale intervention that provided access to daycare centers for children in low-income neighborhoods in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Our results suggest that the intervention had a positive impact on enrollment rates and on the number of years children were enrolled to daycare during early childhood. We also find that winning the lottery had a positive effect on how regularly children attended primary school during the academic year. Because of the high attrition rates in the sample, we are unable to conclude whether the lottery had a positive impact on medium-term academic outcomes like standardized tests scores and overall grades.