Juan PAL will defend his thesis on Wednesday 24 June 2026 at 14:00 pm.
Title of the thesis: Essays in Applied Microeconomics
Building TSE, 1 esplanade de l'université, Toulouse (Auditorium 5)
Supervisor: Professor Matteo BOBBA
Memberships are:
- Matteo BOBBA : Professor in Economics, TSE, Université Toulouse Capitole Supervisor
- Thierry MAGNAC : Professor in Economics, TSE, Université Toulouse Capitole Examinateur
- Ana GAZMURI : Assistant professor in Economics, Universidad Diego Portales Examinatrice
- Petra TODD : Professor in Economics, University of Pennsylvania Rapporteure
- Limor GOLAN : Professor in Economics, Washington University in Saint Louis Rapporteure
Abstract :
This thesis comprises three chapters with two goals: (i) deepen our understanding of how education policies shape the decisions of students, families and institutions, and (ii) inform the design of interventions promoting equity and efficiency in post-secondary education. All chapters draw on rich administrative data from Chile.
Chapter 1, "Education Policy and the Quality of Public Servants," studies how higher education policies can improve public sector recruitment. I exploit Chile's Beca Vocación de Profesor, a program combining a tuition scholarship for high-scoring applicants with a minimum admission standard at participating teacher colleges. The policy raised enrollment of high-performing students into teaching, with substantial extensive margin responses among low-income applicants, and the resulting compositional gains passed through to teacher effectiveness. I embed these reduced-form results in a demand and supply model that incorporates a novel method for solving discrete-continuous games in large markets, where colleges are modeled as boundedly rational players anticipating their closest rivals. Counterfactual simulations show that re optimizing the policy—especially by targeting low-income applicants—would yield further gains in teacher value added at no extra fiscal cost, while comparable gains through wage increases alone would require a far larger budget.
Chapter 2, "Funding Instruments and Effort Choices in Higher Education," with Guillem Foucault-i-Llopart, studies the effects of moving from conditional financial aid to unconditional tuition-free college on enrollment and academic performance. We focus on Chile's 2016 Gratuidad reform, which granted free college to students in the bottom income deciles and removed academic progress requirements typically attached to means-tested aid. A difference-in-differences design shows the reform raised enrollment and persistence among eligible students but had limited effects on completion and dropout. To disentangle compositional change from changes in effort, we develop a structural model in which students endogenously choose effort in response to the funding scheme. Muted aggregate effects reflect compositional change rather than weakened effort, with access gains concentrated among lower-achieving students. Finally,
Chapter 3, "The Educational PPP: Parents, Peers, Prices," with Joaquin Varvasino, decomposes the determinants of post-secondary choices in Chile into financial constraints, information frictions transmitted through parents and peers, and student-program match quality. Linking administrative records on students with those of their parents and high-school cohorts, we exploit three sources of variation: the geographic rollout of private universities in the 1980s as an instrument for parental exposure to higher education, within school panel variation to identify older peers' influence, and the staggered implementation of Gratuidad as exogenous variation in out-of-pocket fees. We find that price subsidies raise university access, older peers increase enrollment and match quality without harming progression, and parental exposure shifts children toward universities and away from short-cycle programs. These findings jointly inform the design of equity oriented higher education policy.
