Why do people acquire consumer debt? In this article, I draw on the case of Chile and call into question the explanatory power of both the "trickle-down" and "privatized Keynesianism" hypotheses. I argue that these narratives fail to explain why, in the context of wage improvements, consumers...

Information plays a key role in markets with consumer choice. In education, data on schools is often gathered through standardized testing. However, the use of these tests has been controversial because of distortions in the metric itself. We study the Chilean educational market and document...

We study the relationship between political regimes and higher education and its implications for social mobility and political opposition in the context of the 1973 coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile. We show that the Pinochet dictatorship's aims of political control and...