Research
Publications, working papers, and work in progress.
Publications
To Profit or not to Profit? Evidence from Chile's For-Profit Voucher Schools
This note examines whether for-profit management affects educational outcomes in Chile's voucher system. Using administrative panel data for all voucher-subsidized primary schools from 2010 to 2014, we compare for-profit and nonprofit schools in terms of inputs and student performance. For-profit schools serve more disadvantaged students and rely on lower-cost inputs, such as less-qualified teachers, but they also provide more instructional hours and smaller classes. After controlling for student characteristics, a significant test-score gap remains, but it is largely explained by differences in school inputs. These results suggest that ownership matters mainly through differences in how schools allocate educational inputs.
@article{boggiano2026profit,
author = {Bárbara Boggiano and Cristián Sánchez and Rocío Valdebenito},
title = {{To Profit or not to Profit? Evidence from Chile's For-Profit Voucher Schools}},
journal = {Applied Economics Letters},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.1080/13504851.2026.2720567}
}
The Effects of Educated Leaders on Policy and Politics: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Brazil
We examine whether and how the educational background of political leaders matters for policy choices and outcomes. Using data on municipalities in Brazil from 2000–2008, we estimate the effects of electing a more educated leader in a regression-discontinuity design whereby policy inputs and outcomes in municipalities where a highly educated candidate barely won the election are compared with those of municipalities where a highly educated candidate barely lost. Our results indicate that highly educated mayors make different choices regarding the allocation of public funds and inputs in critical sectors when compared to non-highly educated mayors, yet they do not produce better indicators on a variety of measurable outcomes. Furthermore, our estimates suggest a negative impact of educated mayors on local economic growth and children's health. We additionally document the existence of heterogeneity in the effects of highly educated leaders along political ideology and age of the candidate. Lastly, highly educated leaders are not more likely to be reelected, suggesting that they are not perceived as better politicians.
@article{bastos2024educated,
author = {Paulo Bastos and Cristián Sánchez},
title = {{The Effects of Educated Leaders on Policy and Politics: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Brazil}},
journal = {Latin American Economic Review},
volume = {33},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.60758/laer.v33i.198}
}Working Papers
Equilibrium Consequences of Vouchers Under Simultaneous Extensive and Intensive Margins Competition
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 in Crisis: Lessons from Chile's Credit Guarantee Program
Government-guaranteed lending was a central policy response to the COVID-19 shock. This paper synthesizes the evidence on Chile's pandemic expansion of its public credit-guarantee scheme—the Small and Medium Enterprise Guarantee Fund, or FOGAPE-COVID—and organizes it around five design levers: targeting and eligibility, risk-sharing and pricing, bank incentives and oversight, coordination with complementary policies, and repayment and exit. Three results emerge from reading the studies jointly. First, the parameters that govern fiscal exposure are the exclusion screen and the loan-size cap rather than the headline coverage rate: relaxing the default-based eligibility screen would have raised expected losses by a factor of 2.7, and a 2.5% first-loss deductible was the difference between the government bearing 41% and 77% of those losses. Second, whether the program prevented defaults or merely deferred them is unresolved: the two studies of the crisis program that address the question reach opposite conclusions. I show that these differences follow from comparison groups, horizons, and crisis-specific screens and caps rather than from the data, with direct implications for how such programs should be wound down. Third, the repayment phase, not the disbursement phase, is where the Chilean evidence is thinnest and where the international record is most cautionary. The paper concludes with a research agenda for crisis lending.
@unpublished{sanchez2026government,
author = {Cristián Sánchez},
title = {{Government-Guaranteed Lending in Crisis: Lessons from Chile's Credit Guarantee Program}},
year = {2026},
note = {Working paper}
}
The Effects of Credit on Firms' Performance: A Survey
This paper surveys recent empirical literature examining the impact of credit supply shocks on firm performance. A critical methodological challenge is distinguishing between supply-driven and demand-driven changes in credit. We review studies employing matched bank-firm data and exploiting idiosyncratic bank-level variation to isolate supply shocks. The survey first explores how banks react to adverse shocks, often contracting credit. We then analyze how firms respond, highlighting the role of alternative financing sources. The core analysis focuses on the consequences of credit supply contractions for firm investment, employment, exports, and prices. The evidence indicates that investment is the most sensitive variable, with significant negative effects. Employment impacts are also generally negative, but often smaller and less consistent. We discuss indirect effects via the value chain and emphasize heterogeneous firm responses, particularly based on size and pre-existing credit constraints. Bank characteristics, such as capitalization, liquidity, and risk exposure, significantly influence their lending behavior during periods of stress. This survey synthesizes recent findings, including those from emerging economies, and identifies areas where further research is needed. The findings have important implications for policies aimed at strengthening the banking system and mitigating the adverse effects of credit supply shocks on firm performance.
@unpublished{deelejalde2025credit,
author = {Ramiro de Elejalde and Brian Pustilnik and Cristián Sánchez},
title = {{The Effects of Credit on Firms' Performance: A Survey}},
year = {2025},
note = {Working paper}
}
The Effects of For-Profit and Nonprofit Subsidized Schools on Academic Performance
This paper estimates the test-score effects of attending for-profit and nonprofit private-voucher secondary schools in Chile. Using administrative data and value-added, instrumental-variables, and structural models, I estimate both average and distributional treatment effects. I find that both school types raise achievement relative to public schools, with larger gains in nonprofit schools. Treatment effects are heterogeneous: nonprofit schools benefit low-ability students the most, whereas gains from for-profit schools are more compressed across the ability distribution. Even so, both for-profit and nonprofit schools generate positive gains relative to public schools throughout the distribution of unobserved ability.
@unpublished{sanchez2026forprofit,
author = {Cristián Sánchez},
title = {{The Effects of For-Profit and Nonprofit Subsidized Schools on Academic Performance}},
year = {2026},
note = {Working paper}
}
The Gender Pay Gap in a Highly Regulated Market
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}
}
Selection in Crisis Lending: Evidence from Chile's Government-Guaranteed Loans
We study the long-run effectiveness of government-guaranteed loan programs implemented during recent crises. Using administrative and loan application data from the Central Bank of Chile, we track firm defaults five years after the COVID-19 shock. Our instrumental-variable estimates show that these loans postponed defaults for two years but did not reduce total defaults in the long run. Banks used private information to direct credit toward firms that would have been safer even without the program. To assess the welfare implications of the delayed defaults and banks' selection of safer firms, we build a dynamic model of heterogeneous entrepreneurs disciplined by our causal estimates. The program generated welfare gains 21% above its fiscal cost, with limited rents for banks and modest increases in aggregate risk-taking. Younger firms are the most cost-effective group to support, yet they are the least likely to be approved because their growth relies on leverage, increasing default risk. A budget-neutral redesign that raises guarantees for younger firms and reduces them for the rest could increase welfare by 6pp.
@unpublished{chittaro2025selection,
author = {Lautaro Chittaro and Cristián Sánchez},
title = {{Selection in Crisis Lending: Evidence from Chile's Government-Guaranteed Loans}},
year = {2025},
note = {Working paper}
}
When Schools Are Full: Capacity Constraints and the Absorption of a Migration Shock
Between 2017 and 2019 Peru's primary schools absorbed 46,000 Venezuelan children, four fifths of them in ten cities, into a public system whose capacity is fixed a year ahead by teaching posts allocated at thirty pupils per section. We use the universe of enrollment records and school censuses to ask how a school system with no slack absorbs an unanticipated demand shock and how the families already in it respond. Public schools near the inflow grew, and they made room almost entirely by enlarging sections: nine tenths of the additional pupils sat in existing sections, the share of sections above the norm rose by seven percentage points in the most exposed cities, and teaching posts remained unchanged within the three years. Private schools did not respond on any margin, neither fees, nor posts, nor sections, and lost a few pupils. Families in exposed grades moved to other schools, toward schools with fewer migrants, and a full school did not slow them down. Capacity mattered on a different margin. Full public schools that received migrants held back fewer pupils and increased dropouts. We write down a model of school choice with a public sector that allocates posts by rule and rations seats, and a private sector with fixed capacity, whose primitives are the resourcing rate and the rationing rule we estimate, and we set out the counterfactuals it will answer: full compliance with the staffing norm, resources that follow pupils, vouchers into a private sector at capacity, and the placement of migrant children across schools with room.
@unpublished{li2026schools,
author = {Faqiang Li and Diana Martínez Heredia and María Adelaida Martínez Cabrera and Cristián Sánchez},
title = {{When Schools Are Full: Capacity Constraints and the Absorption of a Migration Shock}},
year = {2026},
note = {Working paper}
}
The Role of Private-Voucher Schools in the Education-to-Work Transition
We study how private-voucher high schools shape the transition from school to work in Chile. They raise their students' wages and their chances of holding a formal job, notwithstanding their inability to shift higher education attainment. Using administrative data that follow a cohort of public-primary eighth graders into higher education and the labor market, we combine value-added regressions with a sequential model of schooling choices and outcomes. We find that what higher education pays depends on the type of program as much as on completing it. A professional degree raises wages by 0.60 log points relative to a high-school diploma; a technical degree raises wages by 0.37 log points. On the other hand, an incomplete professional spell lowers wages by 0.18 log points and formal employment by 9 percentage points (p.p.), while an incomplete technical spell lowers neither. Because fewer than a quarter of those who start a professional program finish it, the expected return to enrolling in one is statistically indistinguishable from zero, against 0.14 log points for a technical program, and it carries substantially more risk. Attending a private-voucher high school raises higher-education enrollment by 1.8 percentage points, and the increase is entirely professional, drawn out of non-enrollment. However, all of that increase in enrollment materializes in professional dropout, that rises by 1.8 p.p. Yet wages rise by 0.06 log points, and three-quarters of students face a positive expected gain. Essentially all of the positive labor market effects of vouchers come from higher pay within schooling states.
@unpublished{rau2026education,
author = {Tomás Rau and Cristián Sánchez and Sergio Urzúa},
title = {{The Role of Private-Voucher Schools in the Education-to-Work Transition}},
year = {2026},
note = {Working paper}
}
Price and Market Segmentation Consequences of Targeted Vouchers
We study how a large targeted voucher reform reshapes tuition-setting incentives and market segmentation in competitive education markets. We focus on Chile's targeted voucher program, introduced in 2008, which increased per-student funding for disadvantaged pupils while prohibiting participating schools from charging top-up fees to eligible students; participation was voluntary. Using administrative data covering the universe of schools and students over 2004–2015, we exploit cross-municipality variation in pre-reform eligibility shares in an event-study design to estimate equilibrium effects on school fees. Throughout, we distinguish between the posted (sticker) top-up fees that schools set and the out-of-pocket fees that particular households face, which under the reform are zero for eligible students at participating schools. We find that the reform segments the price schedule. Posted fees—the fees non-eligible households pay—fall on average in more exposed markets, consistent with participating schools cutting top-up fees for higher-income families. In contrast, the average posted fee attached to the schooling options of eligible students rises in more exposed markets: although eligible students pay nothing at participating schools, schools that opt out of the program raise their fees, moving upmarket. We interpret these patterns through models of school competition with peer effects and sorting, and we provide supporting evidence from a pre-reform school choice model with peer composition that families exhibit economically meaningful willingness to pay to avoid low-income peers.
@unpublished{canedoriedel2026prices,
author = {Gabriel Cañedo Riedel and Emiliano Ramírez and Cristián Sánchez},
title = {{Price and Market Segmentation Consequences of Targeted Vouchers}},
year = {2026},
note = {Working paper}
}
Risk-Shifting Incentives Under Government Credit Guarantees
This paper studies the risk-shifting behavior of banks under the FOGAPE COVID credit guarantee program in Chile, a large-scale program implemented during the pandemic. Exploiting the program's design, which features varying guarantee rates based on firm size, and using detailed tax and credit data, we investigate whether banks reclassify firms to obtain higher guarantee rates.
Our findings indicate significant reclassification of firms into the small-size category, which benefits from higher guarantee rates. This reclassification is more likely among firms with an existing credit history with the bank.
We develop a structural model to understand how these incentives vary by firm characteristics and to improve the program's design. Our results have important policy implications, suggesting that credit guarantee programs should carefully balance improving credit access with the potential for bank's moral hazard.
Our findings indicate significant reclassification of firms into the small-size category, which benefits from higher guarantee rates. This reclassification is more likely among firms with an existing credit history with the bank.
We develop a structural model to understand how these incentives vary by firm characteristics and to improve the program's design. Our results have important policy implications, suggesting that credit guarantee programs should carefully balance improving credit access with the potential for bank's moral hazard.
@unpublished{deelejalde2025risk,
author = {Ramiro de Elejalde and Cristián Sánchez},
title = {{Risk-Shifting Incentives Under Government Credit Guarantees}},
year = {2025},
note = {Working paper}
}
Supply-Side Responses to Targeted Vouchers
We examine schools' responses to a recent targeted voucher reform in Chile. Private schools' responses to the reform are quicker and larger than public schools' responses; however, schools in both sectors react to the policy along various margins. Private schools enter and exit the market more often. Public and private schools improve educational inputs related to school infrastructure and the teaching staff. Interestingly, private schools' fee responses are such that low income students see an increase in the average fee they face in the market, and higher income students see a decrease in the average fee they face.
@unpublished{canedoriedel2021supply,
author = {Gabriel Cañedo-Riedel and Cristián Sánchez},
title = {{Supply-Side Responses to Targeted Vouchers}},
year = {2021},
note = {Working paper}
}
The Design of Vouchers and Schools' Strategic Behavior: The Case of Chile
I use rich administrative data from Chile and a difference-in-differences strategy to show that the positive effects on test scores of a recent targeted voucher reform found in the literature need to be taken with caution, as I find that the reform significantly decreased the likelihood that low-performing students take the national standardized tests. Specifically, low-performing students are 14.7 percentage points less likely to take the national exams four years after the introduction of the reform, while high-performing students are as likely to take the exams after the introduction of the reform as they were before. Such result cannot be explained by the observed increase in class attendance attributed to the program, but rather suggests a strategic response from schools to the requirement of constantly increasing performance in order to secure the receipt of the new subsidy. The ultimate consequence of this strategic behavior is that the resulting observed distribution of standardized test scores, an instrument that is used by the government to guide many of its policies, and by families to guide their enrollment decisions, may no longer be an accurate representation of the actual distribution, leading to inefficiencies in the allocation of resources.
@unpublished{sanchez2019design,
author = {Cristián Sánchez},
title = {{The Design of Vouchers and Schools' Strategic Behavior: The Case of Chile}},
year = {2019},
note = {Working paper}
}Work in Progress
Carrots and Sticks for Teacher Colleges: The Equilibrium Design of Teacher Recruitment Policy
Heterogeneous Bank Exit and Relationship Reallocation
Equilibrium Effects of College-Loan Regulation: College Expansion, Labor Market Mismatch, and Repayment
Increasing Capacity at Elite High Schools Under Centralized Assignment
High Pay for High Performers in the Teaching Profession
Inputs and the School Quality Effects of Targeted Vouchers
Are For-Profit Schools Worth Trying? Evidence Across Multiple Treatment Margins
The Effects of an Information Intervention on Higher Education Decisions and Labor Market Outcomes