In this paper we analyze the effect of private voucher education on student academic performance using new data on Chilean students and a novel identification strategy. Most schools in Chile provide either primary or secondary education. We analyze the effect of private voucher education on...

This paper analyzes the success of Chile’s Sociedad de Instrucción Primaria (SIP) in providing high quality primary school education to low income children. The paper shows that SIP students’ results in national standardized tests are not due to selection or observables. Interviews with...

This paper estimates the impact of private education on low-income students in Chile. We attempt to reduce selection bias by using reduced-tuition paying, low-income students in private schools as the treatment group, based on our finding that these students were, to some extent, randomly...

Using a survey-experiment methodology we evaluate whether pre-service elementary school teachers’ expectations about students’ achievement, and beliefs about students’ need for academic support, are influenced by future teachers’ mathematics anxiety level or by gender and socioeconomic...

This paper documents the extent to which teachers are underpaid vis-à-vis workers in other professional and technical occupations in Latin America circa 2007. These labor earnings differences, attributed to observable socio-demographic and job characteristics, are assessed using a matching...

El objetivo de este estudio es indagar sobre las variables educativas, institucionales y sociales que están a la base de los logros educativos de los liceos de enseñanza media en Chile y de las diferencias de resultados entre ellos.<BR> Utilizando datos de la prueba SIMCE de Segundo Año de...

This paper calculates a time series of simple, standard measures of schools’ relative performance. These are drawn from a 1997-2004 panel of Chilean schools, using individual-level information on test scores and student characteristics for each year. The results suggest there is a stark...

The impact of competition on academic outcomes is likely to depend on whether parents are informed about schools’ effectiveness or valued added (which may or may not be correlated with absolute measures of their quality), and on whether this information influences their school choices. To...

Using matching methods, we estimate the public-private wage gap in seven Latin American countries—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Paraguay and Uruguay—for the years 1999 and 2007. These methods do not require any estimation of earnings equations and hence no...

We study parental choice focusing on the transition between primary and secondary school, taking advantage of the fact that most Chilean students have to switch school at the end of the 8th grade, the last year of primary school. Using a recursive probit model we estimate jointly the probability...