Allegra Cockburn

Biography

Allegra is a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, interested in Education, Development and Labor Economics. Her work has focused on quantifying the causal impact of groups that student's identify with, exploiting a novel natural experiment in South Africa. She also works on developing an estimator to estimate enumerator amplifying effects in Randomized Controlled Trial settings. More broadly, her work has focused on barriers to implementation, take-up and scale up of programs and interventions. Currently, she is particularly interested in using empirical techniques to examine ways to facilitate better education and employment outcomes with identity priming.

Allegra has experience teaching Econometrics at the graduate and undergraduate level, and experience designing surveys, managing field teams and fieldwork, liaising with partners and conducting analysis for large Randomized Controlled Trials.

Allegra's work has been supported by the Fulbright Program and the National Research Foundation in South Africa.

Job Market Paper Abstract

"The Gryffindor Effect: The Effect of Manufactured Identity on Student High-Stakes Outcomes"

I leverage a novel natural experiment in which incoming high school students are randomly assigned to be members of one of four groups, all of which share a common environment and common resources, to test whether manufactured identity can affect high-stakes student outcomes. This setting overcomes challenges to identification in applied work in identity economics: individual identities are often fixed over long periods of time or chosen endogenously. Using a dataset I construct from scratch using Optical Character Recognition and webscraping, I find robust causal evidence that social identity plays an important role in determining student outcomes, including grades on high-stakes senior year exams, sports participation, tertiary education, labor market and social outcomes. I use text analysis to investigate the traits and behaviors groups emphasize to shed light on which group prescriptions drive outcomes in certain directions.