Ana Brás-Monteiro

This paper studies how teachers affect student well-being and subsequent mental health in adolescence. Using linked administrative and survey data from Denmark, we construct a value-added measure of teachers’ effectiveness in improving student well-being during middle school and examine its longer-run effects. We find that teachers have meaningful impacts on students’ contemporaneous well-being. These effects persist several years later: students exposed to teachers with higher well-being value-added during middle school report higher well-being in high school. Going beyond survey-based measures, we find persistent reductions in mental health care utilization and depression diagnoses in adolescence. We further show that our measure of well-being value-added is only weakly correlated with test score value-added, and that both shape distinct long-run outcomes: well-being value-added primarily reduces mental health care utilization and depression diagnoses, while test score value-added has a stronger positive impact on subsequent academic outcomes but also reduces anxiety diagnoses.

Gender gaps in labor supply and household responsibilities persist. Using representative survey data from 24,000 respondents across six countries, this paper explores the actual and perceived preferences of men for couple equity. We document that in all six countries the majority of men state they prefer an equitable division of tasks within the household. At the same time, the actual share of men preferring couple equity is systematically underestimated in all six countries. The perceived shares vary substantially across the population, and they are positively associated with respondents’ own preferences for couple equity. Providing respondents with truthful information about the actual share of men preferring couple equity in their country shifts individual beliefs, own stated preferences for couple equity, as well as the willingness to pay for it. The estimated treatment effects are mainly driven by respondents who initially underestimated the actual share.

Work is not only a means of earning a living, it can also be a source of meaning through the contribution people feel they make to society. Because the choice of academic major largely shapes future career paths, we ask: do students hold accurate perceptions of how fulfilling different fields are in terms of social impact, and how do these perceptions shape major choices? We address these questions through a survey experiment at a large U.S. public university. We find that students substantially underestimate how satisfied previous graduates report being with their contribution, with significant heterogeneity in the extent of underestimation by field. These beliefs are consistent with stereotyping: students believe that graduates in fields such as Health and Social Sciences are much more likely to be satisfied with their contribution than graduates in Physics & Mathematics or Computer Science, while nationally representative data on college graduates shows the gap is much smaller. We show that randomly providing information on previous graduates’ experiences of impact across all fields significantly shifts students’ perceptions, with revisions proportional to their initial misperceptions. These revised beliefs lead students who value social contribution to recommend a broader set of majors to like-minded peers. We see more limited effects on students’ intentions and class enrollment, with significant changes in intentions only among women, who value social impact most and shift toward fields whose social impact they had underestimated.

A large literature shows that students’ rank in academic achievement affects their later outcomes, but social comparisons in school are likely to extend beyond cognitive abilities. We study whether students’ ordinal rank among their peers in non-cognitive skills, such as conscientiousness, agreeableness, and emotional stability, shapes their academic trajectories.