Research

• Direct and Indirect Effects of Schools' Screening under School Choice: Evidence From Chile ‍
  April 2023
  
  Competition in educational markets has long been argued as a driver for improving schools' educational quality. However, schools also compete by implementing selective admission processes, known as screening, competing to attract the best pool of students while avoiding disadvantaged ones. This paper studies the prevalence of these school-side selection mechanisms in a school choice system, their direct impact on students through changes in assignments, and their spillover effects through changes in classroom composition. Using rich administrative data from Chile, we document strong evidence of school-side selection in publicly subsidized private schools, explaining up to 20 percent of their performance gap compared to public schools. Leveraging centralized admission lotteries to simulate counterfactual distributions at individual and classroom levels, we then estimate the impact of screening on students' academic performance, college enrollment, and behavioral outcomes. While we document the value-added benefits of attending selective schools, these effects are of equal magnitude on traditionally accepted and rejected students. These findings oppose school-student fit as the primary driver for screening. In contrast, we find support for sizable peer effects in classrooms that received lottery-induced shocks to their class composition, potentially explaining schools' implementation of screening practices.
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• Men, Women and Capital: Estimating Substitution Patterns Using a Size and Gender-dependent Childcare Policy in Chile
  ‍ Revisions requested at the Journal of Labor Economics
  with Jeanne Lafortune and Jose Tessada
  November 2021
  
  ‍ We test whether men and women have the same degree of complementarity to capital using a policy that obliges firms to fund childcare for their female employees, if they hire more than 19 women. This policy generated bunching at the threshold, particularly since it has become more binding, in male-intensive industrial sectors and in larger firms. Firms that hire 19 women have a higher capital-to-men ratio than firms just above the threshold. Our theoretical framework suggests that the distortion in this ratio is consistent with women being less complementary with capital than men, despite being similar in skills. Our calibration shows that this differential degree of complementarity increased the policy’s distortions, highlighting the relevance of differential degrees of substitutability between men-capital and women-capital to measure the impact of policies with gender components.
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• Resource Misallocation from Childcare Policies
  with Jeanne Lafortune, Loris Rubini, and Jose Tessada
  October 2022
  
  Governments often adopt policies to reduce the cost of childcare for working families but those can distort the allocation of resources. We develop and calibrate a general equilibrium model with firm and household heterogeneity and study the case of Chile, where firms with more than 19 female employees must provide child- care. We find that removing the mandate increases GDP by 3.25%: some households gain up to 14% of consumption units, others lose up to 7%. Financing childcare through labor taxes increases GDP by 3.48%, making every household better off, with gains of up to 36% for the poor.
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• The Battle of Ideas: The Effects of Donations Reliance in the U.S. Higher Education System
  November 2021
  
  Higher education institutions in the United States receive a sizeable and growing share of their resources from philanthropic contributions. The proportion of research funding pro- vided by donations reaches up to 30 percent of funding at elite institutions, a large share of which comes from a few concentrated donors, usually through private foundations. Recent research indicates that private foundations deploy funding strategically to influence policy decisions, evidencing a mechanism through which contributors can influence universities’ policies. This analysis assesses contributors’ political drive in funding deployment by exploit- ing transaction-level data from over 75,000 private foundations from 2000 to 2018, totaling almost $100 billion, and data on individuals’ political campaign contributions. The estimations indicate that increasing contributor-university ideological differences by one percent reduces donations between 1.1 and 1.5 percent, even after accounting for foundations’ preferences for other attributes. The salience of political ideology is more substantial among wealthier contributors, donors supporting research and elite institutions, and donors deploying restricted-use funds. The effect is less prominent for donors supporting public schools and scholarships. Given the estimated ideological preferences of contributors, estimations show that universities face incentives to tilt towards more extreme views to accommodate donors’ political preferences and increase donations. These incentives are consistent with the polarization observed in the higher education system in recent decades.