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Our working papers represent ongoing research in technology, education, and social impact. These publications contribute to the academic community and inform our mission of using technology to help people make important decisions.

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The Global Gender Gap in STEM Applications: Pipeline vs. Choice
Women make up only 35% of global STEM graduates, a share unchanged for a decade. Understanding this gap requires distinguishing gender differences in academic preparation (pipeline) from gender differences in application choices (choice gap), a separation that is rarely feasible because preparation, eligibility, and choice are typically intertwined. We exploit a unique setting to unpack these two channels: coordinated college admissions systems where eligibility is fully determined by academic performance and assignment is implemented through a truth-telling mechanism. Focusing on high-achieving students who face no binding access constraints allows us to isolate application choices in the absence of other objective barriers. Pipeline gaps vary widely (tending to track countries' stages of development, as one might expect) ranging from female disadvantage in Uganda to advantage in Sweden. By contrast, the choice gap is large, negative, and remarkably consistent across settings with substantial differences in population size, economic development, and gender norms: even among top scorers, women are about 25 percentage points less likely to apply to STEM. This consistency points to structural forces shaping women's STEM choices across diverse contexts.

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Designing Smart School Choice Recommendations: Heuristics for Sure Alternatives
The proposed research introduces a school choice policy that recommends guaranteed school alternatives for students left unassigned under stable matching. Leveraging revealed preferences, it designs a personalized recommendation mechanism that offers voluntary allocations to unlisted but potentially desirable nearby schools. Results indicate that in the main round, the mechanism can (i) reduce the proportion of unmatched applicants by up to 50%, (ii) increase expected aggregate utility by 2–6%, and (iii) concentrate utility gains among applicants who apply to oversubscribed programs. Overall, the policy offers a cost-effective and scalable solution to improve match outcomes by redistributing excess demand within centralized assignment systems.

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Approximating the Equilibrium Effects of Informed School Choice
This paper studies the potential small and large scale effects of a policy designed to produce more informed consumers in the market for primary education. We develop and test a personalized information provision intervention that targets families of public Pre-K students entering elementary schools in Chile. Using a randomized control trial, we find that the intervention shifts parents' choices toward schools with higher average test scores, higher value added, higher prices, and schools that tend to be further from their homes. Tracking students with administrative data, we find that student academic achievement on test scores was approximately 0.2 standard deviations higher among treated families five years after the intervention. To quantitatively gauge how average treatment effects might vary in a scaled up version of this policy, we embed the randomized control trial within a structural model of school choice and competition where price and quality are chosen endogenously and schools face capacity constraints.