Email: rrodriguezramirez [at] g [dot] harvard [dot] edu
Hi! I’m a fourth year Ph.D. student candidate in Education Policy and Program Evaluation (Economics of Education Field Course). My research is driven by a central question: How can education systems be adapted to protect and rebuild human capital when faced with large-scale shocks like conflict, displacement, and political crises? My academic and personal journey, which started in Nicaragua, has given me a strong motivation to address learning inequalities caused by political instability and forced migration.
I focus on designing and evaluating scalable interventions that can reduce these inequalities. A core part of my approach is to integrate robust psychosocial support within educational settings to ensure all children can learn effectively. The centerpiece of my current work is a large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) in Armenia that I co-lead across 450 public schools. This project is designed to meet the educational and psychosocial needs of children displaced by the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. I also recently co-led another RCT in Ukraine with over 10,000 students, where we embedded mental health components into an online tutoring program and saw positive impacts on learning outcomes and student well-being.
This paper provides insights into human capital investments during wartime by presenting evidence from three experiments of an online tutoring program for Ukrainian students amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The program provides three hours of weekly math and Ukrainian language tutoring in small groups over six weeks, and uses academic and psychosocial tools to address student challenges at different intensities of disruption. Results from all three experiments show significant improvements in math and Ukrainian language scores by as much as 0.49 SD and 0.40 SD and a reduction in stress levels by up to 0.12 SD. The program improves peer support, fosters positive learning attitudes, and helps students develop social-emotional skills, contributing to improved learning and mental health. The benefit-cost ratios show that benefits exceed costs in each experiment.
Shared decision-making: Does quality of care affect contraceptive use?
Whether higher quality of care in contraceptive counselling improves client outcomes is an important question that does not find a clear answer in the extant literature. Using a trial that tested various approaches to increase the uptake of modern contraceptives among the clients of an urban hospital in Cameroon as its background, this study examines the association between a quality of care index for contraceptive counselling and the probability of using a modern method approximately four months later. We find that high quality contraceptive counselling is associated with higher levels of contraceptive use at follow-up and greater client satisfaction. While previous studies have primarily focused on continuation rates among contraceptive users, this study shows that high quality of care can be also instrumental by potentially increasing take-up rates among all clients. The study also shows that a quality of care measure that was validated in rural India can be easily and reliably used to assess process quality in urban Cameroon.
In utero exposure to civil conflict: Nicaraguan war and its long-term effects on socioeconomic outcomes
We examine the Nicaraguan Civil conflict in the seventies that ended up with the overthrown of the Somoza dictatorship and the start of the Sandinista Revolution. Nicaragua between 1977 and 1979 experienced high rates of war confrontation. After the announcement of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN, by its acronym in Spanish) in November of 1977, the country had undergone a civil war which ended up with a range of 30,000-50,000 casualties. The escalated confrontation allows us to examine the long-term effects of the war-related conflict on the subsequent generation’s socioeconomic outcomes. In particular, this paper aims to identify whether in-utero exposure to the civil conflict in Nicaragua has a negative impact on individual’s education, labor and marriage market outcomes. We exploit the variation in timing of and geographical exposure to the civil conflict during the last year of the dictatorship. We use data from the Nicaraguan National Census to exploit differences across regions and across cohorts, our preliminary findings indicate that the civil conflict negatively affected those exposed to the conflict in utero. In particular, the long-term consequences of the war decreased educational attainment, formal employability, and thus reducing lifetime earnings, especially for females. The exposure to the civil conflict also seems to decrease marriage probability.
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Published Work
Book Chapters
From Closure to Recovery: Tracing the Educational Impact of COVID-19 in Chile
This chapter analyzes the effects of school closures in Chile, the nation with the longest period of school closures among OECD countries. Using data from PISA (national level) and SIMCE (student level) in 2022, we examine the association between school closures and students’ GPA, attendance rates, and math and reading scores. Our findings show that, on average, students’ attendance rates and math and reading scores experienced a decline, while their annual GPA increased after 2020. The results also show that school closures affect students differently depending on their demographic and socioeconomic backgrounds.
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Papers
The rise of post-pandemic bullying and its association with student achievement and school attachment: Evidence from Chile
International Journal of Educational Development, 2026, 103677.
Most of the research on the pandemic has focused on assessing the impact of school closures on learning loss. Less attention has been paid to how school social dynamics changed after COVID-19. In this study, we examine whether bullying increased after the pandemic and whether the association between bullying exposure and student achievement changed in the post-pandemic period. To do so, we used student-level census data from 10th graders before and after the pandemic in Chile, which experienced the most extensive school closures among OECD countries. We compare 10th-grade students before the pandemic (in 2016 and 2018) with those after the pandemic (in 2022). All forms of bullying (physical, verbal, social, and via the internet) increased in the post-pandemic cohort, with the increases concentrated among already-vulnerable groups for physical and cyberbullying. Moreover, the achievement gap between bullied and non-bullied students widened after the pandemic: bullying exposure in 2022 is associated with significantly lower scores in mathematics and reading, and GPA than the same exposure before the pandemic. Students exposed to bullying also report weaker attachment to their schools. While our cohort- comparison design does not identify the causal effect of bullying on learning, the patterns we document suggest that the deterioration of school social dynamics may be one of the most important long-term legacies of the pandemic.
Does the small business program benefit self-employed workers? Evidence from Nicaragua
Business and skills training programmes have been a popular social policy intervention to increase productivity of the self-employed in developing countries. We study the Small Business of the Family Economy programme, a government business training programme designed to assist Nicaraguan self-employed workers. Using data from three rounds of the Nicaragua Living Standards Measurement Survey, we employ a difference-in-differences strategy to exploit variation in eligibility for the programme across time and economic activity. Our estimates indicate that the programme does not increase self-employed workers’ earnings overall. However, we find heterogeneous treatment effects for female self-employed workers with low educational attainment, which could be explained by increased working months and having a second job.
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Pre-Doctoral Studies (Before 2023)
Books
Ciudadanía y violencia. Una aproximación a sus múltiples expresiones
From a structure and agency perspective, this article analyzes the criticism and crisis in Nicaragua during the Ortega administration (2007-2020). It shows that the "singular trials" of social sectors to curb authoritarianism and capitalism, interpreted by the government as enemies of progress (2007- March 2018), went through a "general judgment" of social and business sectors represented in the Alianza Cívica that, witnessing crimes against humanity, criticize authoritarianism and injustice, which the government evaluates as an attempted coup (April 2018-2020). The conflict between trials led to a national dialogue with partial decisions, while the socio-political and economic crisis deepens. The analysis reveals the need for promoting democracy with social justice
Movimientos sociales y acción colectiva en Nicaragua: Entre la identidad, autonomía y subordinación
(with Mario Sánchez, Douglas Castro, and Jorge Guerra)
This article analyzes the evolution of three social movements (Natives, women and workers) at key moments of the history of Nicaragua: the dictatorship of Somoza (1934-1979), the Sandinista revolution (1979-1990) and the neoliberal era (1990-2000).
¿Ha sido importante la cooperación internacional para el desarrollo y el crecimiento económico?
La cooperación internacional al desarrollo ha sido divulgada como una operación que se realiza con el objetivo de promover el desarrollo y crecimiento económico de los países. Sin embargo, la cooperación no solamente se basa en la idea del mejoramiento económico de los países sino también en las relaciones político-económicas que los países tienen y en la forma en que éstos administran los recursos. Esto sugiere que el estudio de la cooperación debe abordar contextos, políticas e ideales tanto de los cooperantes como de los beneficiarios. En el presente artículo se desarrollaron dos modelos econométricos, estimados a través de datos panel. Primero, un modelo de selectividad que hace referencia a la cantidad de dinero desembolsado a sectores estratégicos de la economía por parte de los donantes y, segundo, un modelo de eficacia de la cooperación para valorar la incidencia de la ayuda en el desarrollo y crecimiento económico. A través de estos dos modelos, el paradigma actual de la cooperación presenta debilidades al momento de establecer ejes estratégicos. Por esto, es necesario que el debate sobre el rol de la cooperación tenga un carácter activo en las políticas tanto de los países cooperantes como de los beneficiarios.
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Reports
Improving the well-being of adolescent girls in developing countries
