Despite the renewed interest in technical education, only a handful of studies analyze its effect on academic outcomes. In this paper we apply a regression discontinuity design to oversubscribed technical high school tracks in Pernambuco, Brazil, to identify the impact of technical education...

This paper contributes to the teacher sorting literature by analyzing equity in the distribution of teachers in three educational systems in Latin America, with different equalization policies, teacher assignment rules, and incentives to work in disadvantaged schools: Chile, Colombia, and Peru....

In this article, we explore whether the evaluation instruments used to recruit teachers in the national teacher hiring process in Peru are good predictors of teacher effectiveness. To this end, we estimate teacher value-added (TVA) measures for public primary school teachers in 2018 and test for...

Inequality in access to high-quality teachers is an important driver of student socioeconomic achievement gaps. We experimentally evaluate a novel nation-wide low-cost government program aimed at reducing teacher sorting. Specifically, we tested two behavioral strategies designed to induce...

This paper estimates the effects of school accountability on year-to-year teacher mobility in Chile. An accountability program was introduced between 2012 and 2015, which established sanctions for persistently low-performing schools, including the threat of closure if they failed to improve...

This research examines the effect of accountability threats for low performing schools on resource allocation decisions and provides evidence that schools act with strategic behavior only when the accountability pressure is high. We used a generalization of a traditional regression discontinuity...

This paper explores rank-ordered teacher candidates' preferences for public schools in Peru by analyzing the 2015 teacher hiring process. Our analysis shows that, in seeking permanent positions in public schools, candidates appear to search closer to where they attended their Teacher Education...

The extensive sorting of more talented teachers into the most advantaged schools contributes to the wide socioeconomic achievement gaps in Latin America. The Chilean Pedagogical Excellence Assignment (AEP, for its Spanish acronym) is a unique program in the region that provides monetary...

To contribute to the debate about the reorganization of the public-school supply, in this paper we analyze a reform introduced in Colombia in 2001 that merged several independent small schools into a single educational institution, with the same name, administration, educational project and...

To contribute to the debate about decentralization of education management, in this paper, we take advantage of the arbitrary rule used in Colombia to define the municipalities that can autonomously manage schools, to evaluate through a Regression Discontinuity methodology the effect of...