The positive impact that competition has on performance in most industries has been questioned in the education sector. The difficulty to measure competition, the idea that parents don't rationally choose schools for their children, and that schools do not react to that choice is in the center...

This paper uses different approaches to determine the contribution of internal policies and external factors on the good performance of the Bolivian economy in the recent past. It is demonstrated that the extremely favorable external conditions are mainly responsible for its bonanza, and that...

This paper develops a framework for evaluating the importance of the arrival of new information for forecasting, estimation, and decision making. By fusing known and recently developed statistical tests and concepts, the paper provides guidelines for detecting outliers, influential observations,...

Despite having accumulated physical and human capital at significant rates, Latin America's growth has been generally disappointing. Successful growth episodes have been accompanied by surges in TFP, sound and stable macroeconomic policies, and fewer distortions and government interventions....

Through flows from 3 states, employment, unemployment and out of the labor force, we analyze the dynamics of labor markets in Chile from 1962-2007. We identify some periods of different labor market regimes and relate them with changes in flexibility. We found that reforms such as that of 1967,...

Most road accidents in Chile (causing about 1,600 deaths per year) are linked to speeding. A widely used control mechanism all over the world, the speed detectors, enabled in the middle of the 1990's was then suddenly prohibited in Chile through the enactment of a law justified on the idea that...

In the period 2000 - 2006, municipal or public schools reduced its enrollment in 186,000 students (13%) in Chile. Meanwhile, privately subsidized schools, receiving the same type of funding, increased their enrollment in 386,000 students (38%). In this paper we distinguish demand factors,...

The educational voucher system builds on the pillars of informed choice and competition to improve the quality of the education provided. This document summarizes some of the results of recent literature on the subject, and discusses their public policy implications.

One of the pillars of the educational voucher system is that competition between schools to attract students would improve the quality of the education provided. Surveys in Chile have suggested that parents are not aware of the performance of their children's schools. In this paper, we assess...