The educational voucher system builds on the pillars of informed choice and competition to improve the quality of the education provided. This document summarizes some of the results of recent literature on the subject, and discusses their public policy implications.

One of the pillars of the educational voucher system is that competition between schools to attract students would improve the quality of the education provided. Surveys in Chile have suggested that parents are not aware of the performance of their children's schools. In this paper, we assess...

The voucher in education firmly relies on the parent´s ability to choose their child´s school. One factor which may reduce this choice is the presence of switching costs, caused by factors such as the stress that children experience and the loss of social networks. We develop a methodology...

The positive impact that competition has on performance in most industries, has been questioned in the "education industry." The idea that competition is limited, that parents don't choose schools for their children considering quality and that schools do not react to that choice is in the...

This paper uses different methods to evaluate the performance of students of public, subsidized, and private schools; distinguishing among for-profit and non-profit schools.

One of the pillars of the educational voucher system instituted in Chile is that competition among schools to attract students would improve the quality of the education provided. Surveys have suggested that families rank the distance of the school from their home as the most important factor...

This paper develops direct tests for evaluating the performance of two types of emergency employment programs put in place in Chile since 1999. Our results suggest: First, decentralized and “market-driven” programs (subsidies for hiring and training) are more efficient in terms of...

We study school choice within the family, analyzing how birth order, gender, innate talent, and family financial restrictions impact the parents´ decision to prioritize the education of one or more of the children over the rest. We find that parents, particularly from lower income homes, are...