Patrick McEwan, Luella LaMer Slaner Professor in Latin American Studies and Professor of Economics at Wellesley College

Targeted education transfers reduced long-run ethnic inequality in Chile Faculty

Funding Source: Spencer Foundation Small Grant – Since 1991, Chile has provided renewable cash grants to indigenous students from lower-income households, conditional on enrollment in primary, secondary, or tertiary grades. We estimate intent-to-treat effects of grants on indigenous adults, leveraging variation in expected grant years across birth cohorts and never-treated adults, and using fixed effects to absorb unobserved variables shared by adults born in the same year and community. Cohorts with the greatest exposure had 0.6 more years of schooling, 10% more hours worked, and 22% higher labor earnings, reducing pre-treatment ethnic differences. After-tax earnings gains are 190 times larger than net government expenditures. Newspaper article La Tercera; YouTube video:Indigenous Scholarship Seminar: A successful policy to reduce ethnic inequality in Chile.

Faculty: Patrick McEwan
Department: Economics
Funding Source: Spencer Foundation Small Grant