About Nicolás

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Economics and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and a 2023–24 Fellow of the National Academy of Education — one of the most competitive fellowships in the field of education policy.

I’m an applied microeconomist, where my research focuses on teacher shortages, the evaluation of financial aid and school accountability policies.

My job-market paper 📄, “A Loanly Road to Teaching: Recruiting Talented Students Through Service Scholarships,” uses a fuzzy regression-discontinuity design and 14 years of national administrative data from Chile to evaluate a large-scale, conditional service scholarship aimed at attracting high-scoring students into teaching in publicly funded schools—a persistent global policy challenge. I develop a novel applied econometric approach to show that, while the program successfully recruits additional high-achieving students into teaching, it does not increase persistence in teacher preparation programs, leading to unmanageable levels debt burdens among recipients. The study’s methodological contribution is readily adaptable to other types of financial aid and to fields such as nursing, law, or medicine.

Previously, I worked at Chile’s national Quality of Education Agency, where I led the development of dashboards and statistical reports used to guide policy decisions, including the design of the school accountability system. I am also an experienced R and Stata user, and have taught quantitative methods in both the Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences (QMSS) program and the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University.

You can find my CV here 📄.