Biography
Pedro Luís Silva is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Department of Applied Economics, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He is also an Assistant Professor of Research at CIPES (on leave), and a Research Affiliate at IZA(Institute of Labor Economics) and GLO (Global Labour Organization). He previously worked at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Porto. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Nottingham from2021 and a Master’s Degree from Nova SBE. During his PhD, he was a visiting student at the IAE-CSIC in Barcelona.
His areas of specialisation are educational economics, which focuses on higher education, labour economics, and applied microeconometrics. He focuses his research on the transition from high school to higher education and to the labour market. He has published scientific papers in journals such as the Journal of Human Capital, Bulletin of Economic Research, B.E. Journal of Economics Analysis and Policy, Education Economics and the European Journal of Education. He has been part of and led teams in projects funded by public and private entities, namely the Horizon Europe Framework, the Foundation for Science and Technology, the Edulog Foundation, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Innovation in Spain, and the European Commission. He is a national representative on the European Network of Graduate Tracking, a body set up by the European Commission responsible for providing recommendations to the commission on tracking higher education graduates. He is also part of the team that implemented the Eurograduate Survey in Portugal, so he has experience dealing with national stakeholders on implementing European projects. He also collaborates with international institutions, namely, OECD and Unesco.
Abstract
We provide the first causal estimates of the effect of a purely income-based affirmative action quota on university enrollment, using a population-level design that does not condition on endogenous application decisions. Existing studies regress enrollment outcomes on policy indicators within the sample of applicants, conditioning on an endogenous intermediate: the decision to apply to university. Conditioning on application introduces collider bias, which can distort estimates of every downstream margin. We study Portugal’s 2023 introduction of a quota reserving 2% of university seats for students from verified low-income families (ASE-A), exploiting comprehensive administrative data on the universe of secondary school graduates from 2017-2024. Our primary estimand is the unconditional enrollment rate, defined over the full population of income-eligible graduates rather than over university applicants. We find that the quota increases the unconditional probability of university enrollment by 4.5 percentage points (8% relative increase). However, only 37% of eligible students opt to register under the quota. We document strong positive selection into quota usage: users have higher GPAs and are younger than eligible non-users. Among quota registrants, enrollment increases by 12 percentage points, implying that low take-up substantially limits the policy’s aggregate effect. We find that information frictions and academic preparation gaps drive non-participation, while we find mixed evidence on credit constraints and strategic application behavior. Our results demonstrate that income-based quotas can meaningfully expand educational access, but that policies targeting the take-up margin, such as proactive outreach and simplified registration, may achieve enrollment gains comparable to quota expansion at substantially lower resource cost.
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