Fall 2025 Colloquium talk - Francisco Gallego

With the start of the Fall 2025 semester colloquium series, we are pleased to announce the first of three scheduled talks.

This first colloquium talk will be delivered by Francisco A. Gallego, Full Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and Fellow of the Econometric Society. The talk will be held on Thursday, September 11, 2025, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM.

To attend the colloquium talk please register using this link.

Abstract:

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, a unique initiative in Peru harnessed national television to keep students engaged in education. The short telenovela Decidiendo para un Futuro Mejor (Deciding for a Better Future, DFM) highlighted the benefits of schooling while providing practical information on wages and financial aid for higher education.

A randomized controlled trial with more than 80,000 families found that simple phone calls encouraging students to watch DFM significantly reduced school dropout rates in 2021. The intervention lowered dropout by about 0.6 percentage points, a meaningful effect given the 10.2% average dropout rate in the control group. The strongest impacts were observed in schools facing higher poverty and dropout levels, while parental education showed no major differences.

The study suggests that the positive effects were driven by increased viewership of DFM rather than the phone calls themselves, underscoring how cost-effective, information-based interventions can help buffer the negative educational impacts of economic shocks.