Research on
educational opportunity.

Do elite colleges help talented students join the social elite, or help incumbent elites retain their positions? We combine intergenerationally-linked data from Chile with a regression discontinuity design to show that, looking across generations, elite colleges do both. Lower-status individuals who gain admission to elite college programs transform their children’s social environment. Children become more likely to attend high status private schools and colleges, and to live near and befriend high-status peers. In contrast, academic achievement is unaffected. Simulations combining descriptive and quasi-experimental findings show that elite colleges tighten the link between social and human capital while decreasing intergenerational social mobility.

This paper uses rich administrative data from Chile to provide causal evidence that the local institutions of the neighborhood to which inmates return after prison matter. Specifically, we show that the opening of an Evangelical church reduces twelve-month reincarceration rates among property crime offenders by 11 percentage points, an effect that represents a drop of 18% in the probability of returning to prison for this group of individuals. We discuss three classes of mechanisms that could drive these effects: promotion of Evangelism, provision of social support, and increased difficulty to commit crimes. Our analyses suggest that the social support that Evangelical churches offer to their communities—i.e., charitable activities and alcohol and drug abuse rehabilitation—is an important driver of their effects on recidivism. Evangelical churches also seem to make it more difficult to commit crimes by reducing the number of potential criminal partners in the neighborhood. Finally, we show that NGO openings also reduce recidivism. Organizations helping their beneficiaries to improve their earnings potential or to overcome alcohol and drug abuse problems reduce reincarceration rates by 11 and 10 percentage points respectively. These results suggest that interventions that give recently released inmates access to local support networks could play an important role in encouraging desistance from crime.

This paper uses rich administrative data from Chile to estimate teacher-value added (TVA) on test scores and on an index of educational attainment. We allow each teacher to have a different TVA for male and female students and show that differences in TVA explain an important part of the gender gaps we observe in test scores and in postsecondary education trajectories. We next exploit rich information on teaching practices and show that at least in terms of the practices we observe there do not seem to be important differences in what makes teachers effective for male and female students. We do find, however, significant associations between certain practices and teacher effectiveness, which suggest that some teaching strategies benefit all students independently of their gender. Finally, we also show that on average female teachers are more effective at teaching female students and that math teachers tend to be biased in favor of male students. Interestingly, teachers with smaller gender biases seem to be more effective for both, male and female students.

The identification of peer effects is challenging. There are many factors not related to social influences that could explain correlations among peers. This article discusses the main challenges for the identification of peer effects, describes some of the empirical strategies commonly used to overcome these challenges, and summarizes the main findings of the literature on peer effects in education. Peers have been shown to affect many important outcomes, including academic performance and educational trajectories. Confirming the existence of peer effects is important from a policy perspective. Both the cost-benefit analysis and the design of policies are likely to be affected by the existence of social spillovers. However, making general policy recommendations from the current evidence is not easy. The size of the peer effects documented in the literature varies substantially across settings and depending on how peers are defined and characterized. Understanding what is behind this heterogeneity is thus key to extract more general policy lessons. Access to better data and the ability to map social networks will likely facilitate investigating which peers and which characteristics matter the most in different contexts. Conducting more research on the mechanisms behind peer effects is also important. Understanding these drivers is key to take advantage of social spillovers in the design of new educational programs, to identify competing policies, and to gain a deeper understanding of the nature and relevance of different forms of social interactions for the youth.

This paper provides causal evidence that close neighbors significantly influence potential applicants’ decision to attend university. I create a unique dataset combining detailed geographic information and individual educational records in Chile, and exploit the quasi-random variation generated by student loans eligibility rules. I find that potential applicants are significantly more likely to attend and complete university when their closest neighbor—-defined as the closest individual applying to university one year before—-becomes eligible for a student loan and enrolls in university. This increase in enrollment is mediated by an increase in the probability of taking the admission exam and applying to university. The closest neighbor typically lives 0.09 km away, and neighbors’ influence decays with distance. My results highlight the importance of social influences for university enrollment decisions and suggest that financial aid and university access policies may have important spillover effects.

Family and social networks are widely believed to influence important life decisions but causal identification of those effects is notoriously challenging. Using data from Chile, Croatia, Sweden, and the United States, we study within-family spillovers in college and major choice across a variety of national contexts. Exploiting college-specific admissions thresholds that directly affect older but not younger siblings’ college options, we show that in all four countries a meaningful portion of younger siblings follow their older sibling to the same college or college-major combination. Older siblings are followed regardless of whether their target and counterfactual options have large, small or even negative differences in quality. Spillover effects disappear, however, if the older sibling drops out of college, suggesting that older siblings’ college experiences matter. That siblings influence important human capital investment decisions across such varied contexts suggests that our findings are not an artifact of particular institutional detail but instead a more generalizable description of human behavior. Causal links between the postsecondary paths of close peers may partly explain persistent college enrollment inequalities between social groups and suggests that interventions to improve college access may have multiplier effects.

This paper investigates whether the effects of a reform that substantially increased daily instruction time in Chilean primary schools vary depending on school institutions. Focusing on incumbent students and exploiting an IV strategy, we find that longer daily schedules increase reading scores at the end of fourth grade and that the benefits are greater for pupils who began primary education in no-fee charter schools rather than in public schools. We provide evidence that these two types of publicly subsidized establishments, which cater to similar students but differ in their degree of autonomy, expand the teaching input in different ways: in order to provide the additional instruction time, no-fee charter schools rely more on hiring new teachers and less on increasing teachers’ working hours than public schools do.