I study supply-side responses to a targeted voucher program with voluntary school participation, combining administrative data from Chile with an equilibrium model of school demand and competition. The policy induces market segmentation: lower-quality schools opt in and reduce fees, while higher-quality schools opt out and raise them. Low-income students face lower prices and modest quality gains; higher-income students shift toward non-participants. Budget-neutral redesigns improve the quality mix of participating schools but yield limited gains for low-income students, given their low willingness to pay for school attributes. Only mandated participation delivers appreciable gains, at higher fiscal cost.

@unpublished{sanchez2026equilibrium,
  author = {Cristián Sánchez},
  title  = {{Equilibrium Consequences of Vouchers Under Simultaneous Extensive and Intensive Margins Competition}},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {Working paper}
}

Government-guaranteed lending programs were a central policy response to the COVID-19 shock. This paper examines Chile's pandemic expansion of its public credit-guarantee scheme—the Small and Medium Enterprise Guarantee Fund, or FOGAPE-COVID—as a case study for the design of crisis lending programs. It synthesizes key evaluations of the Chilean program, highlighting both its effectiveness in sustaining liquidity, employment, and credit flows and the operational and institutional challenges identified in the literature. The evidence indicates that the program mitigated immediate default risks and supported credit access for small and medium enterprises during the acute phase of the pandemic. However, long-term analyses reveal that it largely postponed rather than eliminated defaults, underscoring the importance of repayment structures and post-crisis solvency management. The partial guarantee structure preserved banks' screening incentives, reducing moral hazard and improving credit allocation. Additional design features—including interest rate caps, deductibles, and eligibility criteria—helped contain aggregate risk and fiscal exposure. The studies reviewed also emphasize the importance of intermediary behavior, particularly banks' responses to guarantee incentives, which can generate risk shifting that must be managed through careful program design and oversight.

@unpublished{sanchez2026government,
  author = {Cristián Sánchez},
  title  = {{Government-Guaranteed Lending in Crisis: Lessons from Chile's Credit Guarantee Program}},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {Working paper}
}

This paper studies gender pay disparities in Mexico's public-school system, a highly regulated labor market with standardized pay schedules and centralized wage setting. Using administrative payroll data from 2016 to 2024, we compare teachers in identical positions within the same school to estimate gender differences in pay for equal work. We find an equal-work wage gap of 0.018 log points. About half of this gap is accounted for by slower progression of women through the horizontal promotion system. Gender differences in total earnings are larger, at 0.045 log points, reflecting both men's greater likelihood of holding multiple positions and the larger gender pay gap in teachers' secondary jobs. We also show that motherhood reduces women's wage rates—as well as labor supply and earnings—and identify one novel mechanism underlying the decline in wage rates: mothers' switching to working in localities with greater amenities but lower pay.

@unpublished{bordon2026gender,
  author = {Paola Bordón and Ricardo Estrada and Cristián Sánchez and Miguel Sarzosa},
  title  = {{The Gender Pay Gap in a Highly Regulated Market}},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {Working paper}
}