Thank you, Alexandra!

I am also really passionate about teaching economics! #TeachEcon
I served as the Graduate Pedagogy Fellow for my department at UCSC, working with teaching teams to design scaffolded, active-learning based activities and effective assessments for high-enrollment courses.
See more: bit.ly/gs_teaching

Beyond my JMP, I’m working on several other projects in education. One of these (with
@RobertFairlie6
, Saurabh Khanna, and Prashant Loyalka) is forthcoming at Journal of Political Economy: Microeconomics.

You can check them out here: bit.ly/research_gag...

(11/n)

Link to JMP: bit.ly/jmp_gagandeep

I am immensely grateful for the support of my advisors and committee members: Laura Giuliano, George Bulman, and Robert Fairlie, as well as the incredible #econ department at UC Santa Cruz
(10/n)

Relying solely on test-score VA to evaluate teachers can miss the teachers who are most effective at improving non-cognitive skills, which matter for boys’ trajectories. This suggests we need better ways to measure and integrate non-cognitive VA into accountability systems.
(9/n)

What does this mean for policy?
Test-score VA measures a real dimension of teaching, but it’s (a) not all that teachers do, and (b) has stronger impacts on girls—who are not the group falling behind.
(8/n)

As a result, I show that the gender-differentiated impacts of teachers are not stemming from teachers teaching boys and girls differently, or from teacher-like-me effects—but from teachers' individual strengths interacting differently with students' relative skill gaps.
(7/n)

Applying this framework to the data, I show that gender gaps in observed outcomes imply gender gaps in unobserved skills—specifically a relative deficiency in non-cognitive skills for boys and in cognitive skills for girls (even with girls outperforming boys).
(6/n)

To interpret these results, I propose a framework wherein teachers' strengths interact with the relative skill mixes of their students. I show that teachers who improve a given skill have stronger impacts on the group of students with a relative deficiency in said skill.
(5/n)

(a) Teachers who improve cognitive skills improve girls' test scores and course grades more than boys' outcomes.
(b) Teachers who improve non-cognitive skills improve boys' outcomes more than girls' outcomes
(c) They are typically not the same teachers!
(4/n)

Prior work measures teacher effectiveness (aka value-added) in both test scores and grades, interpreting them as teacher impacts on cognitive and non-cognitive skills respectively. I build on this, by studying teachers’ gender-differentiated impacts in each dimension. Here’s what I find👀:
(3/n)

This figure shows average standardized math and reading measures for for 3 cohorts of students in North Carolina who can be followed from 3rd-8th grade. Blue lines represent standardized test scores and red lines represent teacher-assigned course grades. Solid lines plot the average for boys and dashed lines plot the averages for girls. The left figure plots all outcomes for math, and the right figure plots all outcomes for reading. In both subjects, girls consistently outperform boys in course grades, and the gap between girls and boys increases as students progress through school. For reading standardized tests, girls consistently outperform boys. For math standardized scores, boys start off doing better than girls, but the gap shrinks as students progress through school, and flips by 8th grade.

My JMP investigates gender gaps in standardized test scores and teacher-assigned grades as students progress through school—and the role that teachers play in this context. Boys are typically behind on both these metrics, and these gaps persist/grow with time.
(2/n)

I'm excited to announce that I am on the 2025-26 economics job market!
I’m an applied microeconomist working on education, gender, and inequality—with a focus on how teachers and institutions shape student outcomes.
A 🧵on my #JMP and other projects:
#EconSky
(1/n)