Santiago Perez-Cardona

Most evidence on affirmative action comes from elite institutions, where admission changes where students enroll rather than whether they complete school. I study centralized admission to higher-secondary school in India, exploiting separate cutoffs for unreserved, Scheduled Caste, and Scheduled Tribe applicants in a regression discontinuity design. A seat offer raises Grade 12 passing by 0.6 percentage points at the unreserved cutoff and 2.8 points at the Scheduled Caste cutoff, implying a 2.2-point gain from reallocating the marginal offer. The corresponding Scheduled Tribe difference is not statistically distinguishable from zero. This heterogeneity is primarily an access effect, since Scheduled Caste offers are much more likely to induce enrollment. These gains coexist with evidence consistent with mismatch in the most selective academic track, where reserved admission raises failure and lowers performance. The effect of expanding reservation therefore depends on which group receives the marginal seat and whether admission expands access or changes academic placement.

We study how migrants’ perceptions of social acceptance in their host country shape their engagement with the financial system. Conducting a survey experiment with 2,115 Venezuelan migrants in Colombia, we find that 66% of participants underestimate the extent to which Colombians are open towards migrants. Providing accurate information about native attitudes corrects these misperceptions and increases migrants’ willingness to engage with the financial system. Among individuals who initially underestimated Colombians’ acceptance, the intervention increases willingness to visit a bank by 15%, open a digital wallet by 12%, and open a savings account by 18% relative to the control group mean. Effects are concentrated among individuals who have not directly experienced discrimination. Using an instrumental variable strategy, we show these effects are driven by belief updating, and find that corrections persist six months later. Our findings highlight that misperceptions about social acceptance can be an important driver of self-exclusion from the financial system among migrant populations.