Essays on the Chilean school system and labor market

This dissertation consists of three essays related to the Chilean school choice system and labor market. The first essay concentrates on estimating the determinants of school choice from the perspective of the household. It focuses on whether parents respond to school quality when choosing schools. The second essay uses this structural estimation to conduct a series of simulations aimed at measuring the welfare effects of school choice. The third paper explores the relationship between school hours and female labor participation.;The first essay's aim is to measure which attributes of schools are more relevant for parents when selecting schools. Using a big sample for the Chilean capital, we find that distance to school, co-payments, and standardized tests scores are the characteristics parents care more about. Another finding is that schools that face a more elastic demand in some of these characteristics tend to increase them more in the following period, thus providing indirect evidence that school choice does create incentives for schools and that schools do respond to them. The second essay uses the estimations above to do a series of policy simulations aimed at measuring the welfare effects of school choice. We find that, while school choice as implemented in Chile is a potentially Pareto superior policy, some aspects of it affect people in different ways and that, in general, poor students lose and should be compensated. Another simulation shows that a differentiated voucher that is inversely related to student socioeconomics can implement said compensation.;Starting in 1997 schools in Chile began to expand school hours by law requirement, this constitutes a natural experiment that can be used to address whether Chilean women are constrained from working by childcare limitations and labor market rigidities. Using a simple diff-in-diff approach the impact evaluation presented in the third paper shows that women expanded their labor supply between 3.2 and 4.0 percent in response to longer school hours. The action on the extensive margin is evidence that women face significant rigidities for entering the labor market in Chile.