The paper estimates the effect of delayed school enrollment on student outcomes, using administrative data on Chilean students that include exact birth dates. Regression-discontinuity estimates, based on enrollment cutoffs, show that a one-year delay decreases the probability of repeating first...

International assessments of academic achievement are common. They are usually accompanied by attempts to infer the determinants of cross-country achievement gaps, but these inferences have little empirical foundation. This paper applies the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to the problem of...

In 1980, Chile began financing public and most private schools with vouchers. This paper uses 1997 data on over 150 000 Chilean eighth-graders to compare Spanish and mathematics achievement in six types of public and private schools, including voucher schools operated by Catholic and...

In Chile, indigenous students obtain lower test scores, on average, than non-indigenous students. Between two cohorts of eighth-graders in the late 1990s, the test score gap declined by 0.1 to 0.2 standard deviations. An Oaxaca decomposition and related descriptive evidence suggest that the most...

The paper suggests that typical estimates of returns to primary education are over-estimated, because import costs to individuals are excluded. In calculations with Honduran data, private returns are found to drop significantly when private costs are included. It is suggested that lower private...