Parent engagement with their children plays an important role in children's eventual economic success and numerous studies have documented large gaps in parent engagement between low-and higher-income families. While we know remarkably little about what motivates parents to engage in their children's development, recent research suggests that ignoring or discounting the future may inhibit parental investment, while certain behavioral tools may help offset this tendency. This paper reports results from a randomized field experiment designed to increase the time that parents of children in subsidized preschool programs spend reading to their children using an electronic reading application that audio and video records parents as they read. The treatment included three behavioral tools (text reminders, goal-setting, and social rewards) as well as information about the importance of reading to children. The treatment increased usage of the reading application by one standard deviation after the six-week intervention. Our evidence suggests that the large effect size is not accounted for by the information component of the intervention and that the treatment impact was much greater for parents who are more present-oriented than for parents who are less present-oriented.

El presente trabajo explica el desempeño académico de los estudiantes de primer año pertenecientes a cuatro universidades chilenas. Para ello se utilizan las pruebas estandarizadas de ingreso a la universidad (PSU) y la concentración de notas de enseñanza media (NEM), incluyendo una medida de habilidad relativa, generada a partir del Registro de Estudiantes de Chile (RECH). Los resultados indican que haber estado entre los mejores estudiantes de la escuela de egreso implica un mejor desempeño universitario, aun controlando por los puntajes obtenidos en las PSU y las NEM para cada carrera. Lo anterior sugiere que nuestra medida de habilidad relativa captura información (eventualmente no cognitiva) que no entregan las variables de selección actualmente en uso, y que es relevante para explicar desempeño de los estudiantes en el primer año de educación universitaria.

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Using matching methods, we estimate the public-private wage gap for urban workers in eleven Latin American countries for the 1992-2007 period. These methods do not require any estimation of earnings equations and hence no validity-out-of-the-support assumptions; furthermore, this approach allows us to estimate not only the average wage gap but also its distribution. Our main findings indicate that the average public sector worker earns more than his/her private counterpart, and that this differential increased over the 1992-2007 period. Important differences along the wage distribution are also shown in the results; in fact, public servants in the highest percentiles of the wage distribution generally earn less than their private sector equivalents. Nonetheless, the percentile at which a positive wage gap becomes a wage penalty shifted over the period as the average wage gap experienced by most countries widened. Still, the most qualified public sector workers do face a wage penalty. Furthermore, indicators of government effectiveness show no relationship with the country ranking according to the public-private wage gap.

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