Alan Sánchez Jiménez
Senior Researcher
PhD in Economics - University of Oxford
asanchez@grade.org.pe
Alan has a DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford, where hi also holds a Master’s degree in Economics for Development. Currently, he holds dual affiliations as a Senior Researcher at the Oxford Department of International Development (ODID) at the University of Oxford, and a Senior Researcher at the Group for the Analysis of Development (GRADE). Between 2012 and 2023, he was a Senior Researcher for the Young Lives Study and a Visiting Resarcher at ODID. Previously, he was an Economic Research Specialist in the Economic Research Division of the Central Bank of Peru and taught courses on quantitative methods for impact evaluation and social development policies. His areas of interest include impact evaluation, economics of education, health economics, labor economics, and behavioral economics. He is particularly interested in measuring the causes and consequences of accumulating human capital throughout the life cycle, evaluating public programs through experimental and quasi-experimental methodology, and survey design.
Publications
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Unpacking the COVID-19 gender employment gap among young people in the global south
2025 Douglas Scott, Richard Freund, Marta Favara, Catherine Porter, Alan Sanchez
We provide new evidence on the employment gap between young men and women in three low- and middle-income countries during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. We estimate a year-end increase of 17–18 percentage points in Peru and India (Andhra Pradesh and Telangana), and 9.5 percentage points in Vietnam. A mediation approach is used […]
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Chapter in BookEnsino médio, educação integral e tempo ampliado na América Latina: Vol. 2. Cenários e desafi os contemporâneos
Interrupción escolar en secundaria en el Perú: datos, evidencia y políticas
2025 Vanessa Rojas, Antonio Campos, Santiago Cueto, Alan Sanchez
Discontinuation of schooling by students in secondary education in Peru is a critical problem that impacts the development of young people and their future opportunities. Despite advances in educational coverage, structural challenges persist that unequally affect different groups of students. This paper examines trends in secondary school dropout, its main causes and the public policies […]
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JournalJournal of Development Economics
The long shadow of conflict on human capital: Intergenerational evidence from Peru
2025 Alessandra Hidalgo, Catherine Porter, Alan Sanchez, Saurabh Singhal
This paper estimates the intergenerational impacts of mothers’ exposure to the 1980–2000 Peruvian civil conflict on their children’s socio-emotional skills development. We combine longitudinal data, which measures skills across a child’s life, with historical geo-located conflict data. Exploiting spatial and temporal variation in conflict episodes, we find that mothers’ exposure to conflict has adverse intergenerational […]
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Young Lives attrition report: Round 7
2025 María de los Ángeles Molina, Marta Favara, Alan Sanchez, Amanda Woodman
Over more than 20 years, Young Lives has followed two cohorts born seven years apart (Favara et al. 2021). This technical note documents the attrition rates from the seventh round of the Young Lives survey carried out in Ethiopia, India (the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana) and Peru in 2023–24, when the Younger Cohort […]
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Interrupción escolar y vulnerabilidad educativa en el Perú: Datos, estudios y recomendaciones para la educación básica en el Perú
2024 Vanessa Rojas, Antonio Campos, Santiago Cueto, Alan Sanchez
This report presents data, studies, and analyses related to the interruption of studies, commonly referred to in the literature as school dropout or early school leaving, whether temporary or permanent. Here, we use the term “school dropout (interruption of studies)” to refer to children and adolescents who are not enrolled in regular basic education (EBR, […]
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How early nutrition and foundational cognitive skills interconnect? Evidence from two developing countries
2022 Alan Sanchez, Marta Favara, Margaret Sheridan, Jere R. Behrman
While the long-term consequences of early stunting on educational attainment and on school achievement tests are well-known, there is scarce evidence about the specific mechanisms through which early stunting leads to poorer educational outcomes, especially in LMIC contexts. We use unique data collected in Ethiopia and Peru as part of the Young Lives to investigate […]
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The impact of the JUNTOS conditional cash transfer programme on foundational cognitive skills: does age of enrollment matter?
2022 Douglas Scott, , Alan Sanchez, Jere R. Behrman
This paper studies the relationship between the age of enrolment in Peru’s conditional cash transfer programme, JUNTOS, and the foundational cognitive skills of a sample of children aged between 5 and 12 years old. Using a difference-in-differences approach and exploiting within- household variation, the authors show that younger siblings in recipient households display significantly higher […]
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Late-childhood foundational cognitive skills predict educational outcomes through adolescence and into young adulthood: Evidence from Ethiopia and Peru
2022 Jennifer López, Jere R. Behrman, Santiago Cueto, Marta Favara, Alan Sanchez
The authors estimate the associations between a set of foundational cognitive skills (inhibitory control, working memory, long-term memory, and implicit learning) measured at age 12 and educational outcomes measured at ages 15 and 19-20 in Ethiopia and Peru (the Young Lives study). The estimates adjust for a rich set of lagged controls and include measurements […]
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Unpacking the post-lockdown employment recovery of young women in the global south
2021 Douglas Scott, Richard Freund, Marta Favara, Catherine Porter, Alan Sanchez
This paper analyses the difference in short-term employment recovery between young men and women in India, Peru and Vietnam following the national lockdowns imposed in all three countries during 2020. The authors employ a mediation model to establish whether – and to what extent – commonly suggested mechanisms are responsible for a relatively slower recovery among […]
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Young lives, interrupted: Short‑term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescents in low- and middleincome countries
2021 Alan Sanchez, Marta Favara, Richard Freund, Catherine Porter, Douglas Scott
This study contributes to the understanding of how severely a cohort of adolescents have been impacted by the crisis, using comparable longitudinal data from four Low- and Middle- Income countries (LMICs) that have been very differently affected by the health crisis: Ethiopia, India (states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana), Peru and Vietnam. In particular, Peru […]
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JournalEconomics of Education Review
Late-childhood foundational cognitive skills predict educational outcomes through adolescence and into young adulthood: Evidence from Ethiopia and Peru
2024 Jennifer López, Jere R. Behrman, Santiago Cueto, Marta Favara, Alan Sanchez
We estimate associations between foundational cognitive skills (inhibitory control, working memory, long-term memory, and implicit learning) measured at age 12 and educational outcomes measured at ages 15 and 19–20 in Ethiopia and Peru, using the Young Lives data. The estimates adjust for rich sets of controls and include measurements of children’s baseline abilities. For a […]
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JournalWorld Development
Does early nutrition predict cognitive skills during later childhood? Evidence from two developing countries
2024 Alan Sanchez, Marta Favara, Margaret Sheridan, Jere R. Behrman
The existing evidence linking early undernutrition to educational outcomes in developing countries is largely focused on assessing its impacts on grade attainment and achievement test scores, with limited evidence on the foundational cognitive skills required to perform well at school. We use unique data collected in Ethiopia and Peru as part of the Young Lives […]
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JournalHigher Education Quarterly
‘Marketization’ of higher education in Peru: Who attends private institutions and what are the perceived advantages (disadvantages)?
2023 Amrit Thapa, Alejandra Miranda, Alan Sanchez, Jere R. Behrman
Debate continues on the effects of the global proliferation of private higher-educational institutions, especially for-profit institutions. The authors examine two related questions for Peru using mixed methods: Who attends private institutions and what are their perceived advantages/disadvantages? Longitudinal quantitative data suggest higher-educational segmentation starting early in life, whereby young people from wealthier households attended private […]
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JournalFood Policy
Employment and wage effects of sugar-sweetened beverage taxes and front-of-package warning label regulations on the food and beverage industry: Evidence from Peru
2023 Juan Jose Diaz, Alan Sanchez, Francisco Diez-Canseco, Jaime Miranda, Barry M. Popkin
Peru increased its sugar-sweetened beverage tax by 8 percentage points (from 17% to 25%) in 2018 and in 2019 imposed front-of-package warning labels on processed and ultra-processed foods and beverages high in sugar, saturated fats, and sodium or containing trans fats. We assess the pre-COVID-19 impacts of these two policies on aggregate formal employment and […]
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JournalInternational Journal of Obesity
School environments and obesity: A systematic review of interventions and policies among school-age students in Latin America and the Caribbean
2022 María Jesús Vega-Salas, Claudia Murray, Richard Nunes, Alessandra Hidalgo-Arestegui, Katherine Curi-Quinto, Mary E. Penny, Santiago Cueto, Julie Anne Lovegrove, Alan Sanchez, Karani Santhanakrishnan Vimaleswaran
The rapid rise in obesity rates among school children in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) could have a direct impact on the region’s physical and mental health, disability, and mortality. This review presents the available interventions likely to reduce, mitigate and/or prevent obesity among school children in LAC by modifying the food and built […]
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Productividad sectorial en el Perú: un análisis a nivel de firmas
Productividad en el Perú: medición, determinantes e implicancias2016 Nikita Céspedes, Maria E. Aquije, Alan Sanchez, Rafael Vera-Tudela
This paper estimates the production function at the firm level of the Peruvian economy, which allows us to characterise the productivity of the firm through its total factor productivity and its labour productivity. The data correspond to all formal firms that reported data between 2002 and 2011. This information allows us to correct for the […]
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Estratificación de los retornos a la educación superior en el Perú: El rol de la calidad de la educación y las opciones de carrera
2021 Alan Sanchez, Marta Favara, Catherine Porter
This policy brief analyses the situation in Latin America and the Caribbean with respect to their levels of growth in the higher education attendance rate. In the case of Peru, the gross attendance rate at this level increased between 2001 and 2019 (for 17-21 year olds). In this context of increased access, the quality of […]
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Do more school resources increase learning outcomes? Evidence from an extended school-day reform
2021 Jorge M. Agüero, Marta Favara, Catherine Porter, Alan Sanchez
It remains an open debate whether allocating more resources improves the learning outcomes of students in low-performing public schools. We focus on the effect of increased instructional time, which is theoretically ambiguous due to possible compensatory changes in student, teacher or parent effort. Using a regression discontinuity approach, we find that a reform that extends […]
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Understanding teenage fertility, cohabitation, and marriage: the case of Peru
2016 Alan Sanchez, Marta Favara, Pablo Lavado
In the Young Lives’s surveys and national statistics, 1 in 5 women had at least one child by the age of 19. It is proposed to strengthen public policies to delay teenage pregnancy: complete secondary school, improve sex education and promote self-confidence.
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El impacto del programa Juntos sobre la nutrición temprana
2013 Miguel Jaramillo, Alan Sanchez
A&P basado en los hallazgos más destacados del estudio de Miguel Jaramillo y Alan Sánchez, publicado en el DI 61 de GRADE y en la Revista Estudios Económicos 23 del BCR, "Impacto del programa Juntos sobre nutrición temprana"
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Projects
- The influence of executive functions in the mental health of vulnerable adolescents: a multi-site focus and of low- and medium-income countriesOctober 2018
- Relationship between adolescent pregnancy and adolescent maternity and educational and labor outcomes: an approach based on ENDES dataMay 2018
- Replicating the eligibility rule of the Juntos program: 2005-2017February 2018
- Transitions from the school to the labor market and higher education in PeruFebruary 2018
- Young Lives Peru 2017-2018April 2017
- Technical assistance for the preparation of a cost-effectiveness analysis report of the pilot of an alternative cash transfer incentives schemes of JuntosSeptember 2016
- Young Lives PeruApril 2016
- ¡Expande tu mente! Activando el potencial educativo de estudiantes de bajo rendimiento en Perú a través de una intervención psicológicaJuly 2015
- Elaboration of a methodological proposal for the National Evaluation ECERS-R and EDI in 2014November 2013 - December 2013
- Public expenditure on Latin American Children: How much and how effective?September 2013 - December 2013
Media
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Peru: If You Think You Can Get Smarter, You Will
June 20, 2017 Education and learning
Get a closer look at the evidence on the impact of “Expand your Mind”, a low-cost and short-term innovation conducted by researchers Ingo Outes from University of Oxford, Alan Sánchez from the Group for the Analysis of Development, and Renos Vakis from the World Bank, with the aim to conveying to students the idea that intelligence can grow […]
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Selected Publications
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Young Lives, interrupted: Short-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on adolescents in low- and middle-income countries
2022 Marta Favara, Richard Freund, Catherine Porter, Alan Sanchez, Douglass Scott
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Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on anxiety and depression symptoms of young people in the global south: Evidence from a four-country cohort study
2021 Alan Sanchez, Catherine Porter, Marta Favara, Annina Hittmeyer, Douglas Scott, Michelle G Craske, Revathi Ellanki, Tassew Woldehanna, Le Thuc Duc, Alan Stein
