Government fragmentation and educational outcomes: evidence on the creation of municipalities in Chile

Manuel Alcaíno, Analia Jaimovich, Carolina Méndez and Diana Vásquez

No 11987, IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank

Abstract: We explore how government fragmentation affects public education provision by examining the case of Chile, which created 11 municipalities between 1994 and 2004. Using territories that sought, but failed to, achieve independence as controls, we find that schools in newly created municipalities, on average, experienced a standard deviation decline of 0.2 in elementary school mathematics performance. In addition, fragmentation led to a high turnover and increased job insecurity of classroom teachers and school management teams in newly created municipalities. In contrast, we found that reducing the size of the original municipalities school networks does not impact student outcomes or school personnel. Overall, our findings point to specific unintended educational effects of policies that seek to enhance horizontal decentralization.

Keywords: Municipalities; Education; Chile (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H83 I21 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-edu and nep-ure
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:idb:brikps:11987

DOI: 10.18235/0003977

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