Browsing by Author "Chumacero, Romulo A."

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    Competition Pressures and Academic Performance in Chile
    (2016) Chumacero, Romulo A.; Gallegos Mardones, Juan; Paredes, Ricardo D.
    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 of the debate. We critically analyze the prevailing methodology in the literature that relates competition and educational performance, and the data used to estimate that impact. We propose a methodology that considers relevant substitutes for each school using various attributes which parents consider when choosing schools, and we apply it to estimate the effect of competition on educational performance in Chile, were more than 90% of the students are covered by a voucher. The evidence supports the hypothesis that competition has a positive, statistically significant, and economically relevant educational impact on private and public schools.
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    I would walk 500 miles (if it paid): Vouchers and school choice in Chile
    (PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD, 2011) Chumacero, Romulo A.; Gomez, Daniel; Paredes, Ricardo D.
    One of the pillars of the educational voucher system is that competition among schools to attract students would improve the quality of the education. Surveys to parents and previous work suggested that families rank the distance of the school from their home as the most important factor for choosing a school. They also suggest that parents largely ignore the results of standardized tests. We use a novel data-set which includes precise measures of the distance between homes and schools to analyze the determinants of school choice in Chile. Economic theory suggests, and the estimations confirm, that parents consider quality and the location when choosing schools. The paper quantifies the relevant trade-offs. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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    School choice and information
    (UNIV CHILE DEPT ECONOMICS, 2012) Gomez, Daniel; Chumacero, Romulo A.; Paredes, Ricardo D.
    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 the effect of public information of school quality on the school choice by parents. We use a data set which includes measurements of the distance between homes and schools, and the performance of the school measured by a standardized tests and the school fee for two distinct periods (1996 and 2003). Whereas in 1996, information regarding school performance was scarce, it was widespread in 2003. We conclude that regardless of these considerations, school performance is an important determinant of school choice. Thus, parents appear to act "as if" they knew it when choosing a school. Nevertheless, making public the information regarding the performance of the schools has made it a more important factor in choosing a school.
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    When RateMyProfessors meets Google Scholar: Student Reviews, Appearance, and Research1
    (2023) Chumacero, Romulo A.; Paredes Molina, Ricardo Daniel; Reyes Torres, Tomás Hernán
    We take more than a million student evaluations of almost 200,000 professors from the RateMyProfessors website and link them with information on the research productivity of almost 3,000 professors in Google Scholar to provide a systematic characterization of the relationship between student evaluations and the characteristics of the classes, universities and professors concerned and to test whether students’ appreciations are conditionally related to research productivity. The study concludes that although how “easy” and “interesting” students consider a course to be are the most important determinants of their evaluations, there is a “looks” or “beauty” premium, with no systematic racial, age or gender component. Surprisingly, research productivity is either not significant or is negatively related to the assessment of a professor’s teaching abilities