Three essays on education decisions in Colombia

This dissertation contains three chapters that study education decisions in Colombia. Below are the individual abstracts for each chapter. Chapter 1: Information Policies and Higher Education Choices: Experimental Evidence from Colombia This paper studies whether providing information on funding opportunities and college premiums by degree-college pairs affects higher education decisions in a developing country. We conducted a randomized controlled trial in Bogotá, Colombia, on a representative sample of 120 urban public high schools, 60 of which were assigned to receive a 35-minute informational talk delivered by local college graduates. Using survey data linked to administrative records, we analyze student beliefs and evaluate the intervention. Findings show that most students overestimate true college premiums and are generally unaware of funding options. The talk does not affect earning beliefs but improves knowledge of financing programs, especially among the poor. There is no evidence that information disclosure affects post-secondary enrollment. However, students in treated schools who do enroll choose more selective colleges. These positive effects are mostly driven by students from better socioeconomic backgrounds. We conclude that information policies are ineffective to raise college enrollment in contexts with significant academic and financial barriers to entry, but may potentially affect certain students' choice of college. Chapter 2: Do High School Peers Influence Post-Secondary Decisions? An Endogenous Network Approach This paper studies the influence of high school peers on post-secondary decisions. Peer effects are identified in a social network framework. To collect information on social relationships and post-secondary decisions, over 6,000 senior-year high school students from Bogotá, Colombia, are surveyed and then followed up after graduation using administrative records. An endogenous network model is used to correct for social selection. Results indicate that close peers have some small influence on aspirations and academic performance, however, their effect is too small to translate into actual enrollment choices. Chapter 3: Local Effects of Small-Scale Mining on School Education and Child Labor: Evidence from the Colombia's Gold Rush Driven by a sharp rise in international prices, Colombia experienced a gold rush that reached its peak in 2012. The boom was characterized by the prevalence of small-scale artisan and illegal mining. This paper estimates the local effects of mining on schools and children. Using detailed geographic information, I construct two measures of annual change in local mining intensity capturing both legal and illegal mining: the area covered by active mining titles, and the deforestation in areas with identified gold deposits. Measurement error and potential endogeneity problems are addressed by instrumenting the mining measures with the interaction between gold prices and deposits. The main results indicate that mining significantly increases dropout rates in urban areas. For children aged 9 to 11 this is partially due to a higher probability of working. Results also indicate that in this particular context even legal mining has been harmful to children. The impact is larger when illegal mining is accounted for

Expanding Access and Increasing Student Learning in Post-Primary Education in Developing Countries: A Review of the Evidence

Effective, evidence-based policies on post-primary education are of vital importance as many developing countries start to the see a bulge in secondary and postsecondary enrollment, the product of the achievement of near-universal access to primary school. Finding ways to deliver and promote access to high-quality post-primary education, and to ensure that education is relevant to labor market needs, is one of the great challenges of our times. This must be accomplished in countries where governments face severe budget constraints and many, of not most, parents are too poor to cover the costs out of pocket.International reports such as "A Global Compact on Learning", by the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, emphasize providing opportunities for post-primary education as a first-tier policy challenge. In addition, there has been considerably less progress in gender parity at the secondary level. Meeting these challenges will require a combination of using existing resources more effectively -- which requires both understanding which inputs are key and which are not -- and a range of innovations that may fundamentally alter the current methods of instruction. To that end, the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) has launched a Post-Primary Education Initiative intended to promote policy-relevant research on secondary and post-secondary education in developing countries, which together will be referred to as post-primary education. This paper is a first step in that process. It reviews the evidence to date on post-primary education and highlight the gaps in the literature, with a focus on identifying policies that should be given the highest priority for future researchDifferent countries define primary and secondary schooling differently, and in many countries students attend middle schools, upper primary schools, or junior secondary schools before attending secondary school. For the purpose of this review, "post-primary education" includes everything from upper primary, middle, or junior secondary school through tertiary education, as defined by the local context in different countries, including vocational school and other alternative tracks for this age group. In practice, this means that in the research reviewed, the majority of children are in 5th grade (i.e. 10-11 years old) and older.The review is organized as follows. Section II provides some background on postprimary education in the developing world. Section III explains how papers were selected for this review. Section IV presents a conceptual framework for thinking about postprimary education (PPE), including a brief discussion of measuring outcomes. Section V reviews the evidence pertaining to the demand for schooling (the impact of policies that attempt to increase the willingness of households to send their children to school), and Section VI reviews the evidence on the supply of schooling (the impact of policies that change school and teacher characteristics, and more generally how schools are organized). A final section summarizes the findings, highlighting several research gaps that should receive high priority in future research

Financing lifelong learning

This paper describes and analyzes different financial schemes to promote lifelong learning. Considered are financial instruments to stimulate successful early learning, financial aid schemes and subsidization mechanisms. Theoretical analyses about funding of early learning have mainly focused on vouchers. Yet, the available empirical evidence is more ambiguous about the effects of vouchers than about the effects of conditional cash transfers and financial incentives for pupils and teachers. Positive effects of financial incentives to pupils are not restricted to high ability pupils, as low ability students also seem to benefit. The evidence regarding the effects of subsidy forms is limited. The most prominent knowledge gaps regarding the effects of various financing schemes related to lifelong learning are the effects of vouchers in compulsory education; financial aid schemes for students; and entitlements and individual learning accounts.Tertiary Education,Access to Finance,Primary Education,Teaching and Learning,Economics of Education

What Motivates Common Pool Resource Users? Experimental Evidence from the Field

This paper develops and tests several models of pure Nash strategies of individuals who extract from a common pool resource when they are motivated by a combination of self-interest and other motivations such as altruism, reciprocity, inequity aversion and conformism. We test whether an econometric summary of subjects’ strategies is consistent with one of these motivations using data from a series of common pool resource experiments conducted in three regions of Colombia. As expected, average extraction levels are less than that predicted by a model of pure self-interest, but are nevertheless sub-optimal. Moreover, we find that a model of conformism with monotonically increasing best response functions best describes average strategies. Our empirical results are inconsistent with models of altruism, reciprocity and inequity aversion.common pool resources, experiments, altruism, reciprocity, conformism

Evaluating service supply in conditional cash transfers

textConditional cash transfers are poverty reduction mechanisms that seek to increase demand of social services by combining an income effect with a health or education requirement. This demand-side strategy relies on a tacit assumption about the quality of and access to those services as a path to improve human capital outcomes. Some conditional cash transfers have included supply-side complementary incentives to ensure that services are suitable to deliver a good education and better health. This study reviews the existing evidence on the impact of supply-side incentives in the context of conditional cash transfers. The review finds that a limited number of studies estimate effects of supply in human capital outcomes and only a few impact evaluations consider the role of schools or health centers in enabling access. The evaluations revised find no evidence that supply side interventions coupled with conditional cash transfers directly improve program outcomes. Nonetheless, several studies highlight the relevance of school organization, in terms of school modalities and student/teacher ratios in school enrollment and attendance. Impact estimations as well as the implementation of the supply-side programs also signal the need for a more nuanced understanding of how school management influences a variety of schooling outcomes. In general, the small number of impact estimations and the restricted set of variables used limits the generalizability of the results. For this reason, a principal conclusion of the review is the need for further research on the topic, as well as consistency across impact measures and a more in-depth analysis of school supply and their influence on learning outcomes.Global Policy Studie

Behavioural Development Economics: Lessons from field labs in the developing world

Explanations of poverty, growth and development more generally depend on the assumptions made about individual preferences and the willingness to engage in strategic behaviour. Economic experiments, especially those conducted in the field, have begun to paint a picture of economic agents in developing communities that is at some variance from the traditional portrait. We review this growing literature with an eye towards preference-related experiments conducted in the field. We rely on these studies, in addition to our own experiences in the field, to offer lessons on what development economists might learn from experiments. We conclude by sharing our thoughts on how to conduct experiments in the field, and then offer a few ideas for future research.

Food and cash transfers: evidence from Colombia

We study food Engel curves among the poor population targeted by a conditional cash transfer programme in Colombia. After controlling for the endogeneity of total expenditure and for the (unobserved) variability of prices across villages, the best fit is provided by a log-linear specification. Our estimates imply that an increase in total expenditure by 10% would lead to a decrease of 1% in the share of food. However, quasi-experimental estimates of the impact of the programme on total and food consumption show that the share of food increases, suggesting that the programme has more complex impacts than increasing household income. In particular, our results are not inconsistent with the hypothesis that the programme, targeted to women, could increase their bargaining power and induce a more than proportional increase in food consumption

Using behavioral science to promote international development

https://issuu.com/behavioralsciencepolicyassociation/docs/v3i3_web_bryanhttps://issuu.com/behavioralsciencepolicyassociation/docs/v3i3_web_bryanhttps://issuu.com/behavioralsciencepolicyassociation/docs/v3i3_web_bryanhttps://issuu.com/behavioralsciencepolicyassociation/docs/v3i3_web_bryanhttps://issuu.com/behavioralsciencepolicyassociation/docs/v3i3_web_bryanhttps://issuu.com/behavioralsciencepolicyassociation/docs/v3i3_web_bryanAccepted manuscrip

Does More Mean Better? Sibling Sex Composition and the Link between Family Size and Children’s Quality

Exogenous variation in fertility from parental preferences for sex-mix among their children is used to identify the causal effect of family size on several measures associated with either the allocation of resources towards children within the household or the outcomes of these investments. Results using data from Colombia suggest that family size has negative effects on average child quality. Children from larger families have accumulated almost 1 year less of education, are less likely to enroll in school and about twice as likely to be held back in school. A larger family also increases the likelihood that oldest siblings share a room and reduces the chance that they have access to clean water and sanitary sewer facilities by approximately 15 percentage points, suggesting the existence of negative effects arising from limited household resources. Mothers in these households have less labor participation (over 27 percentage points) and their oldest children are also more likely to engage in labor activities or domestic chores. Children from larger families are also more likely to be physically or psychologically affected by domestic violence within the household. Other less robust but informative calculations using data on anthropometrics, morbidity and immunization records also fit well with the main results of the quasi-experimental research design. The evidence presented here is consistent with the tradeoff between the number and quality of children implied by the theoretical interdependence in their prices and is robust to different specifications, estimation methods and alternative sub-samples.fertility, household behavior, children’s well-being, Colombia

Discrimination in the Provision of Social Services to the Poor: A Field Experimental Study

This paper uses an experimental field approach to investigate the pro-social preferences and behavior of social services providers and the behavior of potential beneficiaries in Bogota, Colombia. Field experiments were conducted using games including a newly designed Distributive Dictator Game in order to examine traits and mechanisms guiding pro-sociality. Replicating the patterns of previous studies, individuals showed a preference for fair outcomes, positive levels of trust and reciprocity, and willingness to punish unfair outcomes. The results provide evidence that the poor trigger more pro-social behavior from all citizens, including public servants, but the latter display strategic generosity. Additional observations include a bias in favor of women and households with more dependents, but discriminatory behavior against stigmatized groups.