Hi!

I'm a 6th-year PhD student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education studying Education Policy and Program Evaluation. 

My research focuses on higher education and workforce development. I'm particularly interested in how education and training can play a role in helping people find better opportunities in the labor market, and how people change their educational decisions in response to changes in the labor market.

You can find the latest version of my job market paper here, and my CV here.

Work in Progress

The Dynamics of Financial Aid Tournaments (JMP)

Financial aid programs in higher education vary widely in design, including how aid is structured and the timing of provision. This paper studies the impact of financial aid provided as a repeated tournament and its dynamic treatment effects. I exploit a relative GPA-based eligibility rule in a regression discontinuity design to estimate the causal impacts of two types of aid - a tuition waiver and a stipend on top. Waivers have powerful effects on student persistence, increasing graduation rates by 12pp, and GPA by 0.4SD. Stipends affect student effort by increasing student GPA in the next semester by 0.3SD and persistence by increasing graduation rates by 8.8pp.
I find a powerful crowding-in effect, where receiving aid in one semester significantly increases the probability of receiving it in the future. Decomposing the impact reveals that a substantial portion of the total long-term benefit of aid comes from the crowding-in of future resources, suggesting that static analyses may underestimate the full value of financial aid programs.

The Race Between Brain Drain and Brain Gain: EU Accession and Human Capital Formation in Newly Joined Member States (In Progress)

A key determinant of investment in human capital is the expected returns to such investment. The removal of barriers to the free movement of labor permits individuals to access a broader range of labor markets, increasing their expected returns to human capital. However, as the opportunities for free movement of individuals have increased, so has the risk of brain drain. Using individual and national-level data from Latvia, I estimate the impact of joining the EU on the quality and stock of human capital in Latvia. What I find is that joining the EU has had a positive impact on both the quality and stock of human capital in Latvia. The process of joining the EU increased tertiary enrolment by 22.9 percentage points, and access to the free movement of labor within the EU increased tertiary attainment by 9.6pp after 10 years. Furthermore, the process of joining the EU had no statistically significant impact on net migration rates, and a positive impact on the total number of individuals with tertiary education.


The Returns to High School Graduation and College Access (In Progress)

This paper evaluates the impact of acquiring a high school diploma for individuals who successfully pass the high school exit exam in Latvia. The especially low threshold for passing the high school exit exam sets the threshold at the 4th percentile of all high school students. This allows me to contribute new estimates to the returns to acquiring a secondary education and the opportunities for additional schooling in an effectively open enrolment system for exceptionally marginal students. What I find is that marginally passing the high school exit exam increases the probability of enrolment into 2-year institutions, but with no impact on graduation rates.

The Dynamic Treatment Effects of HAIL, with S. Dynarski, E. Burland & J. Hayes (In Progress)

Returns to Federally Funded Job Training, with J. Hayes (In Progress)

Presentations and Posters

  • University of California Alianza MX Summer School on the Economics of Migration, 2025
  • Stockholm School of Economics in Riga Open Workshop, 2023, 2024
  • Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management Fall Conference, 2023
  • Association for Education Finance and Policy Annual Conference, 2023

Other Work

Reports

Navigating Public Job Training, Harvard Project on Workforce, 2023

(With  David Deming, Alexis Gable, and Rachel Lipson)

Report on Estonian and Nordic Experience in Implementing Free Higher Education, 2020

(With Sandis Kārkliņš, funded by the Latvian Parliament)

Other

Overview of study programs and their alumni earnings in Latvia, 2025

Latvian higher education accreditation outcomes, 2020