Maison de la Paix - Genève, Room S4 Petal 2 (hybrid event)
PLEASE NOTE: Access to indoor public events is limited to attendees with a Swiss or European COVID certificate. In addition, face masks must be worn to all in-person events at the Graduate Institute.
The Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar is the Economics department's weekly seminar, featuring external speakers in all areas of economics.
As part of the Vilfredo Pareto Research Seminar series, the International Economics Department at the Graduate Institute is pleased to invite you to a public talk given by Marianna Battaglia, Assistant Professor of Economics at University of Alicante.
She will present her work, joint with Lara Lebedinski, titled With a Little Help From My Friends: Medium-Term Effects of a Remedial Education Program Targeting Roma Minority.
Abstract: A poor-performing student can achieve better results by following the footprints of an older friend. In this paper, we study a remedial education program that takes advantage of this phenomenon. Introduced in Serbian primary schools in 2009, the Roma Teaching Assistant Program targets underachieving students belonging to the Roma minority. It assigns one person, usually Roma, to each school participating to provide support to targeted pupils and create a bridge with their community. We estimate its medium-term effects on educational attainments at the end of primary school by comparing students in schools participating and in schools that applied, but were not selected, before and after the introduction of the program. The impacts on marks and standardized test scores are modest, although positive and bigger in schools with a lower percentage of Roma. Roma students are however more likely to choose longer secondary school tracks, a requirement for entering higher education.
Marianna Battaglia is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Alicante, where she is currently teaching the graduate course of Labor Economics II and the undergraduate course of Introduction to Statistics. In the last years, she was Teaching Assistant in Econometrics (PhD level), in Development Economics, in Public Economics, in Macroeconomics and in Microeconomics (undergraduate) at Bocconi University. She was also Lecturer in Quantitative Analysis of Poverty (Master Level), CID, University of Bologna, in 2007. Her main fields of study and research are Development Economics, Labour Economics, Economics of Education and Health, and Applied Econometrics.