Documentos de Trabajo Instituto de Economía

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Browsing Documentos de Trabajo Instituto de Economía by Subject "04 Quality education"

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    Approximating the Equilibrium Effects of Informed School Choice
    (Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), 2019) Allende, Claudia; Gallego Yañez, Francisco Antonio; Neilson, Christopher
    This paper studies the potential small and large scale effects of a policy designed to produce more informed consumers in the market for primary education. We develop and test a personalized information provision intervention that targets families of public Pre-K students entering elementary schools in Chile. Using a randomized control trial, we find that the intervention shifts parents’ choices toward schools with higher average test scores, higher value added, higher prices, and schools that tend to be further from their homes. Tracking students with administrative data, we find that student academic achievement on test scores was approximately 0.2 standard deviations higher among treated families five years after the intervention. To quantitatively gauge how average treatment effects might vary in a scaled up version of this policy, we embed the randomized control trial within a structural model of school choice and competition where price and quality are chosen endogenously and schools face capacity constraints. We use the estimated model of demand and supply to simulate policy effects under different assumptions about equilibrium constraints. In counterfactual simulations, we find that capacity constraints play an important role mitigating the policy effect but in several scenarios, the supply-side response increases quality, which contributes to an overall positive average treatment effect. Finally, we show how the estimated model can inform the design of a large scale experiment such that reduced form estimates can capture equilibrium effects and spillovers.
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    Does Short Term School Tutoring have Medium Term Effects? Experimental Evidence from Chile
    (Instituto de Economía UC, 2021) Cabezas, Verónica; Cuesta, José Ignacio; Gallego Yañez, Francisco Antonio
    This paper explores how short-term tutoring affects educational outcomes in the shortand medium-term. We implemented a randomized experiment of a three-month small group tutoring program in Chile that aimed at improving reading outcomes among fourth graders using college student volunteers. We find small short-term effects on reading outcomes. Using administrative data covering up to eight years after the program ended, we find significant decreases in the probability of dropping out, increases in the probability of timely school progression, and increases in attendance, school grades and test scores. These effects are stronger for students who were ex-ante more likely to drop-out from school. The program effects are stronger for students who established stronger personal connections with the tutors. Our results suggest that tutoring programs may have relevant medium-term effects that go beyond short-term impacts on specific subjects with stronger effects on more at-risk children.