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…

We propose a methodology for evaluating educational performance, from a multilevel perspective. We use partial frontier approaches to mitigate the influence of outliers and the curse of dimensionality. Our estimation considers idiosyncratic variables at the school, class, and student levels. Our model is applied to a sample of students in fourth…

This paper estimates the impact of private education on the academic achievement of low-income students in Chile. To deal with selection bias, we use propensity score matching to compare the test scores of reduced-fee paying, low-income students in fee-charging private voucher schools to those of similar students in public schools and free private…

This study (an impact evaluation of the Chilean full school day program) uses difference-in-differences to estimate the effect of a large increase in instructional time on high school students' academic achievement. The main findings are (i) the program had a positive effect on students' achievement in both mathematics and language; (ii) the…

Reports estimates of peer effects on student achievement, using a 1997 census of eighth-grade achievement in Chile. The data allow detailed measures of peer characteristics to be constructed for each classroom within a school. Estimates suggest that the classroom mean of mothers' education is an important determinant of individual achievement,…

Estimates internal rates of return on primary, secondary, and university education in Chile between 1960 and 1985. Results show a declining time-trend in rates of return (especially social rates) attributable to expansion of the education system, the shift of labor demand from middle education to primary skills, and increasing real costs of…

Empirical analyses of higher education subsidies are commonly misleading because they disregard appropriate age composition in the parental reference population. Further distortions occur depending on parents' categorization by income, occupation, or education. This paper addresses these issues using empirical data from Chile, France, and…

Chile's 1981 decentralization reforms kept most educational finance responsibility with the Ministry of Education, but transferred service-delivery responsibility to municipalities and nonprofit private schools. This paper examines this reform's effects. Municipal finance, tied to fiscal capacity, has created inequities in school expenditures.…