The education of economists in Colombia: Quality differences and its determinants

For the standardized Test of Higher Education Quality (ECAES) taken in 2007 by undergraduate economics students in Colombia, we apply the DiNardo, Fortin, and Lemieux (1996) decomposition technique to estimate what would be the distribution of scores for student in non-accredited programs if they had had the characteristics of students in accredited programs. In particular, we evaluate in which part of the distribution individual, family, program, and institutional characteristics, respectively, have their greatest impact. The score distributions indicate better performance by accredited economics programs compared to non-accredited programs. Results suggest that individual characteristics explain the larger part of the gap, while family features contribute least. The program and institutional characteristics have opposing impacts, mainly around the mean of the score distribution. There are unexplained differences in the production process that appear more efficient in the accredited programs.