Brenda Jarillo Rabling is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Program of Poverty and Governance. She received her Ph.D. in international and comparative education from the Stanford Graduate School of Education (2013), and, graduated cum laude with a B.A. in economics from the Center for Research and Teaching of Economics (CIDE) in Mexico (2004).

Brenda’s primary fields of interest are economics of education and education policy in United States and Latin America. Her research focuses on (a) interventions to improve the educational outcomes of disadvantaged populations; (b) the impact of poverty and violence on educational outcomes (c) and issues related to young children’s health, development and learning.

Her dissertation consists of three-related research papers that investigate the role of the timing, type and quality of early childhood education programs in reducing the school readiness gap in the United States. Using a novel strategy to account for dynamic selection bias, she estimated the differential effect of the age of entry into preschool, and the effect of switching from one type of care to another on children’s cognitive and socio-behavioral outcomes. Her second paper utilizes a matching estimator approach to evaluate the effectiveness of after-school child care programs to reduce the differences in academic achievement between low-income minority children and their more affluent peers. The last paper estimates how much of the social-class gradient in cognitive and socio-behavioral outcomes is explained by socio-economic disparities in the quality of child care environments. Her dissertation work was supported by the American Educational Research Association Dissertation Grants Program and the Stanford Graduate School of Education Support Grant.

Brenda is currently working on three main projects related to violence and education in Mexico. One investigates the impact of exposure to violent crime on educational outcomes. The second is an assessment of a government-sponsored violence prevention program implemented in public schools since 2007. The third one is an evaluation of a community-based program targeting training and educational opportunities for school dropouts who are unemployed and live in areas where crime, violence and vandalism are common.