Alejandra Mizala

School Performance and Choice The Chilean Experience

How to achieve quality in education is a topic of increasing concern throughout the world. Many countries have made a wide variety of reforms and spent an increasing amount of resources to improve the quality of education, but often the results have not lived up to expectations. Chile has made innovative reforms to its educational system. One of the most interesting has been the introduction of a voucher-type subsidy system and the entry of private agents in the market to provide free educational services. This paper examines the Chilean experience by analyzing educational performance in different types of school.

The technical efficiency of schools in Chile

This paper assesses the technical efficiency of schools in Chile, which is defined as the capacity of schools to generate the maximum output (academic achievement) given the quantity of inputs they use. Two alternative methodological approaches for measuring efficiency are used: (i) estimation of a stochastic production frontier, and (ii) data envelopment analysis (DEA), which allows identification of the efficient production frontier of the schools analysed nonparametrically. Each of these techniques has advantages and limitations, which are discussed in the paper; they lead, however, to the same conclusions when a sample of 2000 schools is analysed. The results obtained provide interesting points for educational policy discussion in Chile.

The Effectiveness of Private Voucher Education: Evidence from Structural School Switches.

In this article the authors analyze the effect of private voucher education on student academic performance using new data on Chilean students and a novel identification strategy. Most schools in Chile provide either primary or secondary education. The authors analyze the effect of private voucher education on students who are forced to enroll at a different school to attend secondary education once graduated from primary schooling—structural switches. Moreover, the data set the authors use in this article contains information on previous academic achievement and thus allows them to identify differences in students’ unobservable characteristics. Using a number of propensity-score-based econometric techniques and the changes-in-changes estimation method, the authors find that private voucher education leads to small, sometimes not statistically significant differences in academic performance. The estimated effect of private voucher education amounts to about 4% to 6% of one standard deviation in test scores. In contrast, the literature on Chile based on cross-sectional data had previously found positive effects of about 15% to 20% of one standard deviation.

Beyond Heckscher-Ohlin: trade and labour market interactions in a case study for Chile

In an era of globalization, patterns of economic growth and employment will depend critically upon domestic labour market conditions. This paper presents empirical evidence on how labour market regulations might interact with expanded trade. We present computable general equilibrium model simulations of recent trade reform proposals for Chile.

La Productividad Científica de Economía y Administración en Chile: Un Análisis Comparativo

The first part of this paper compares the volume and scientific productivity of Business Administration and Economics in Chile with the rest of scientific disciplines at the national and international levels. Given that scientific productivity is heterogeneous among different disciplines, the comparisons utilize an indicator that measures their impact relative to the world in the same field. The second part of the paper compares the amounts of public resources allocated to research in the different fields and discusses their relative efficiency in Chile.

Evaluación del desempeño e incentivos en la educación chilena

This paper emphasizes the importance of assessment and incentive systems in education. In particular, it analyzes the design and implementation of the National System of Performance Assessment applied in Chile since 1996. In the first place, we discuss th

The current impact factor and the long-term impact of scientific journals by discipline : A logistic diffusion model estimation

SummaryThis paper estimates the long-term impact of journals aggregated in 24 different fields, using a simple logistic diffusion model, and relates the results to the current impact factor. Results show that while the current and the long-term impact factors have a high correlation coefficient, some fields are systematically slower-moving than others, as they often differ in the proportion of the overall impact through time that occurs in the short term.

US multinationals and Latin American manufacturing employment absorption

Abstract The main purpose of this study is to examine the impact of US affiliates of multinational corporations on the generation of employment in the Latin American manufacturing sector. The emphasis of the analysis is mainly empirical, and an important by-product is the collection and processing of information about the quantitative evidence on the role of US MNCs in the Latin American manufacturing sector. The study focuses on seven countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela) and attempts to answer the following types of questions. Do MNC affiliates constitute a quantitatively significant mechanism in the generation of employment? is the technology employed by MNC affiliates labour-saving? does the presence of the MNCs result in an expanded market with important increases in the sources of employment? The implicit alternative used in this study to examine such questions is the domestic enterprise of similar size to the existing US affiliate located in the corresponding manufacturing branch.

Labour Flexibility: The Case of Chile

How the labour market has responded to changes in the macroeconomic environment has been a question central to the Chilean experience, especially during the 1970s and 1980s, due to the strong structural adjustments, economic cycles and the social costs involved in such processes. In the 1990s, concern for labour flexibility has shifted towards topics less related to the social costs and towards those more centered on competitiveness and economic growth.

Means-Tested School Vouchers and Educational Achievement: Evidence from Chile’s Universal Voucher System

Chile features a universal school choice system, in which a government voucher provides families an opportunity to send students to public or private schools of their choosing. Since its implementation in 1981, the amount of the voucher was flat without adjustments for family income, creating incentives for schools to enroll students from economically advantaged families. In 2008, a policy change adjusted voucher values by the poverty level of students and the proportion of poor students attending each school. We evaluate the effect of this policy on primary school students’ standardized test scores, using time-distributed fixed effects models. We find a positive and significant effect of the means-tested voucher policy on Math and Language achievement. The effect is much larger among private-voucher schools serving poor children, and it increased over the years after the policy change, suggesting that schools require some time to realize the benefits of the policy. Our findings show that moving from a flat to a means-tested voucher improves achievement and equality.