Essays on the Economics of Education in Middle-Income Countries

Abstract

In this dissertation, I study some of the factors that determine schooling decisions in middle-income economies in Latin America. In the first chapter, I examine the impacts of a large-scale program in Colombia that installs water treatment facilities in rural schools. To identify causal effects on student and community outcomes, I leverage variation in the timing of facility deliveries to schools. I find that after a school receives a facility, upper secondary enrollment increases by an average of 14% but enrollment at the primary level decreases on average by 5%. This mixed pattern of the enrollment effects is consistent with heterogeneous treatment effects by school institutional capacity, as the negative enrollment effects are concentrated among schools with low institutional capacity to assume new responsibilities. I do not find effects on achievement or on health outcomes. The second chapter explores the effects of shocks to local economic conditions on school choice at the upper secondary level in the context of Mexico City during the Great Recession. Using administrative records from the city's centralized school assignment mechanism and exploiting geographic and temporal variation in the severity of household income shocks across neighborhoods, I find that school choices are not very responsive to local income shocks. Students are more likely to adjust their school choices along the margin of cost of attendance and the type of adjustment they make varies by socioeconomic status, with wealthier students making countercyclical investments in education while poorer students becoming more likely to choose schools with lower monetary costs. The third chapter investigates the within-household spillover effects of a nationwide policy in Colombia that provided financial aid to high-achieving, low-income students. I use variation in the eligibility for financial aid in a regression discontinuity design. I find that having a sibling eligible for financial aid did not affect achievement at the high school level and preliminary evidence suggests that it did not impact college attendance or achievement, even though the policy had large effects along those margins for its direct beneficiaries.