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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Selected Works in Progress
Supporting Mental Health Through the Promotion of Psychosocial Support in Armenian Schools
