Reply to: Comments on “Goals and gaps: educational careers of immigrant children”

WE THANK MELISSA DELL, REBECCA DIAMOND, AND LAURA GIULIANO for their insightful comments. For the sake of exposition, we summarize such comments into three main questions. First, which are the reasons for the educational choices of immigrant students? Second, what is the role of teachers? Third, what are the long-run effects of the intervention and its spillovers to non-treated students? We next discuss each issue in turn

Happily Ever After: Immigration, Natives’ Marriage, and Fertility

In this paper, we study the effects of immigration on natives’ marriage, fertility, and family formation across US cities between 1910 and 1930. Instrumenting immigrants’ location decision by interacting pre-existing ethnic settlements with aggregate migration flows, we find that immigration raised marriage rates, the probability of having children, and the propensity to leave the parental house for young native men and women. We show that these effects were driven by the large and positive impact of immigration on native men’s employment and occupational standing, which increased the supply of “marriageable men”. We also explore alternative mechanisms - changes in sex ratios, natives’ cultural responses, and displacement effects of immigrants on female employment - and provide evidence that none of them can account for a quantitatively relevant fraction of our results

Hacking Gender Stereotypes: Girls' Participation in Coding Clubs

In this paper, we focus on a project aimed at fostering coding and social skills of girls called Girls Code It Better implemented in Italy. We analyze gender gaps in academic interests and perception of barriers to achieve own career goals, as well as how girls applying to the coding clubs differ from those that decide not to apply. First, we show that there are substantial gaps in academic interests since middle school, with girls being less interested in STEM compared to boys despite the higher willingness to attend university. Girls are also more likely to perceive their own gender and their ability as a barrier to achieve their educational goals. Second, we show that girls who self-select into a coding club are different compared to other girls: in our sample, we can rule out a substantial differences in parental education and occupation that may affect take-up, but girls applying to coding clubs have higher interest in pursuing STEM and they are more likely to perceive own gender as a barrier for their educational goals. Programs aimed at increasing girls’ interest in STEM may be effective in closing the gender gap if they manage to “hack” gender stereotypes and perceived barriers of high-achieving girls

Replication Data for: 'Implicit Stereotypes: Evidence from Teachers' Gender Bias'

The data and programs replicate tables and figures from "Implicit Stereotypes: Evidence from Teachers' Gender Bias", by Michela Carlana

Revealing stereotypes: evidence from immigrants in schools

We study how people change their behavior after being made aware of bias. Teachers in Italian schools give lower grades to immigrant students relative to natives of comparable ability. In two experiments, we reveal to teachers their own stereotypes, measured by an Implicit Association Test (IAT). In the first, we find that learning one’s IAT before assigning grades reduces the native-immigrant grade gap. In the second, IAT disclosure and generic debiasing have similar average effects, but there is heterogeneity: teachers with stronger negative stereotypes do not respond to generic debiasing, but change their behavior when informed about their own IAT

Goals and gaps: educational careers of immigrant children

We study the educational choices of children of immigrants in a tracked school system. We first show that immigrants in Italy enroll disproportionately into vocational high schools, as opposed to technical and academically-oriented ones, compared to natives of similar ability. The gap is greater for male students and it mirrors an analogous differential in grade retention. We then estimate the impact of a large-scale, randomized intervention providing tutoring and career counseling to high-ability immigrant students. Male treated students increase their probability of enrolling into the high track to the same level of natives, also closing the gap in grade retention. There are no significant effects on immigrant girls, who exhibit similar choices and performance as native ones in absence of the intervention. Increases in academic motivation and changes in teachers' recommendation regarding high school choice explain a sizable portion of the effect. Finally, we find positive spillovers on immigrant classmates of treated students, while there is no effect on native classmates

Implicit stereotypes in teachers' track recommendations

We study the relationship between teachers' stereotypes and students' high school choice in a setting where students can enroll in more or less demanding high school tracks. We show that teachers with negative stereotypes toward immigrants, as measured by an Implicit Association Test (IAT), are more likely to recommend lower-tier tracks to immigrant students, relative to natives with similar ability and socioeconomic background. Implicit stereotypes may thus prevent immigrant students from nurturing and developing their academic talents