Should I Stay or Should I Go? The Effect of a Centralized Admission System on School Switching

Sammanfattning

This thesis estimates the causal effect of Chile’s centralized school admissionsystem (SAE) on post-assignment school switching behavior at primary andsecondary entry levels. Using administrative records from the Ministry of Educationcovering approximately 4.5 million student-year observations from 2011 to 2020,I exploit the staggered regional rollout of the SAE across four adoption cohorts.The identification strategy employs the doubly-robust estimator of Callaway andSant’Anna (2021), utilizing private fee-paying schools, legally exempt from thereform, as a never-treated control group.The results indicate that SAE adoption reduced annual school-level switchingrates by 3.97 percentage points on average, representing a 23% decline relativeto the pre-treatment baseline. This aggregate effect masks a dynamic patternin which switching reductions are near zero at adoption but grow monotonically,reaching 8 to 9 percentage points by the third post-treatment year. The reformdid not increase the probability that switches lead to higher-performing schools.The reduction is larger for students in SEP-participating schools. The effect issymmetric across primary and secondary entry levels.