Maria Perez, (a.k.a. cuky), is a Ph.D.
candidate in the Economics of Education program at Stanford University,
where Professor Susanna Loeb is her advisor. She received her professional
degree in economics from Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, and a master’s degree in economics
at Stanford University, with an emphasis on advanced econometrics methods
and behavioral economics. She is a recipient of the Stanford
Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship (SIGF) and the Spencer
Dissertation Fellowship.
Her primary aim is to apply both traditional economic
methodologies and experimental methods to the most pressing education
policy issues we face today. She has pursued this goal throughout her
career. After obtaining her professional degree in economics, she worked
for six years at the American Institutes for Research. As a Senior Research
Scientist, she led large-scale program evaluation and policy analysis
studies that addressed topics ranging from the elimination of bilingual
education, to programs focused on assisting low-performing schools, to
resource allocations in effective high-poverty schools.
At Stanford, she has used the latest econometrics
techniques to draw causal inferences in the absence of randomized
experimentation. She has also come to realize that traditional methods
focus primarily on the presence or absence of an effect, rather than the
underlying mechanisms; she believe that in order to fully learn from and
improve educational policies we need to use innovative approaches to
complement the traditional well-known methods. To this end, her research
agenda is to study the most important education policy issues, coupling
rigorous traditional methods with innovations drawn from various
disciplines to investigate the underlying mechanisms. In her dissertation
research, she applied this approach in the context of performance-based pay
for teachers.
She has also worked closely with Susanna Loeb
conducting research on how differences on teachers’ value-added to student
achievement affect teacher attrition. She has also used quasi-experimental
methods to estimate the causal effect of eliminating bilingual education in
California.
