Studies in the social capital literature have documented two stylised facts: first, a decline in measures of social participation has occurred in many OECD countries. Second, and more recently, the success of social networking sites (SNSs) has resulted in a steep rise in online social...

This paper analyzes gender bias in teaching in low-performing schools in Chile. To carry out the analyses, the authors used videotaped classes for fourth graders and coded 237 tapings. Results show a general (although not uniform) bias in teachers' actions that resulted in less attention to...

Many nations allow private entities to manage publicly funded schools and grant them greater flexibility than traditional public schools. However, isolating the causal effect of attending these privately managed public schools relative to attending traditional public schools is difficult because...

The tracking of pupils by ability into elite and non-elite schools represents a controversial policy in many countries. There is no consensus on how large the elite track should be and little agreement on the effects of any further increase in its size. This paper presents a natural experiment...

We conducted an experiment in low-income schools in Chile to test the effects and behavioral changes triggered by a program that sends attendance, grade, and classroom behavior information to parents via weekly and monthly text messages. Our 18-month intervention raised average math GPA by 0.09...

In this article, we explore whether the evaluation instruments used to recruit teachers in the national teacher hiring process in Peru are good predictors of teacher effectiveness. To this end, we estimate teacher value-added (TVA) measures for public primary school teachers in 2018 and test for...