Why do people acquire consumer debt? In this article, I draw on the case of Chile and call into question the explanatory power of both the "trickle-down" and "privatized Keynesianism" hypotheses. I argue that these narratives fail to explain why, in the context of wage improvements, consumers...

We estimate the transmission of higher education across generations using the arrival of the Pinochet dictatorship to Chile in 1973 as natural experiment. Pinochet promoted a large contraction in the number of seats available for new students across all universities. Using census data, we find...

We provide new evidence on the causal effect of higher education on mortality. Our empirical strategy exploits the reduction in college openings introduced by the Pinochet regime after the 1973 coup in Chile, which led to a sharp downward kink in college enrollment among those cohorts reaching...

Hundreds of thousands of students skipped school during the 2011 student movement in Chile to protest and reform educational institutions. Using administrative data on millions of students’ daily school attendance decisions on protest and non-protest days, a large network composed by the...

Business groups are the predominant organizational structure in modern Chile. This article tests the long-standing hypothesis that the privatization reform implemented by the “Chicago Boys” during the Pinochet regime facilitated the creation of new groups and hence the renovation of the...