Laia Navarro-Sola awarded second prize at the 2025 Banamex Economics Prize
The “Premio Banamex de Economía”, a prestigious Mexican award that celebrates economics research that addresses the country’s most pressing challenges, has awarded second prize to IIES Assistant Professor Laia Navarro-Sola. She shares the honor with co-author Raissa Fabregas from the University of Texas at Austin for their paper “Scaling Education to Marginalized Populations: Long-Run Impacts of Technology-Aided Schools.”
The study investigates the long-term impacts of Mexico’s long-running telesecundarias, or public TV-based secondary schools, and provides rare causal evidence that technology-aided instruction can deliver substantial, lasting benefits at scale. The schooling model, which pairs televised lessons supported by a single generalist teacher, kept delivery costs low while expanding schooling access in rural and underserved communities.
Laia Navarro Sola. Photo: Hanna Weitz/IIES
By analyzing where and when these schools opened between 1980 and 2000, the researchers track exposed students into adulthood and show that increased access to these TV-schools raised lower-secondary completion, brought into the system many students who otherwise would have remained out of school, and raised adult earnings by about 8 percent. Importantly, these findings show that even a relatively low-tech, highly scalable form of blended learning paid off: it increased educational attainment, improved employment prospects, and delivered measurable income gains comparable to those in traditional schools.
Winning second prize in the “Investigation” category, Laia and Raissa join a distinguished group of economists whose work addresses real economic challenges in Mexico with rigorous, data-driven research. The Banamex Economics Prize recognizes studies that combine clear analysis with practical relevance for the country’s development.
Last updated: 2025-11-21
Source: Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES)