The effectiveness of private schools in Chile: Evidence from centralized assignment lotteries

Fidel Bennett, Dante Contreras, Matias Morales and Felipe Subiabre
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Fidel Bennett: Ministry of Labor, Chile
Matias Morales: Tulane University
Felipe Subiabre: Stanford University School of Medicine

No 2504, Working Papers from Tulane University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper estimates the impact on academic achievement of attendance of a private voucher school (PVS), a type of privately managed but publicly funded institution in Chile. We leverage the centralized school choice system (CSCS), which randomizes assignment of seats to both traditional public schools (TPSs) and PVSs when they are oversubscribed and there are ties among applicants. Consecutive iterations of the algorithm allow us to recover the probability of a PVS assignment; conditional on this probability, receipt of a PVS seat offer is as good as random. We find no performance differences four years after assignment between TPS and PVS 4th graders. We do find positive effects of PVS attendance for students who, at the end of 8th grade, must switch schools due to grade configuration and reapply through the CSCS to enter 9th grade in a new school. We observe the outcomes of these students in 10th and 12th grades; those in PVSs perform better by between 0.06 and 0.17\sigma than their TPS peers. However, we cannot rule out the possibility that these results are driven by the fact that students who fail to gain access to a PVS opt for the fully private sector, thus inducing negative selection in the comparison group of students in TPS.

Keywords: private schools; centralized school choice system; vouchers system (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I22 I24 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
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