 Okay, so hi everyone. Good afternoon. It's great to see such a full room a bit intimidating. I must say but I'll do my best So I'll be presenting this paper. We're working on with Anna de la O and Cecilia Rossell all political scientists So go easy on the indigeneity questions, please So I guess the motivation for this is what motivates this whole conference, right? Like despite the fact that we've had significance at advances in the region in several fronts including political economic and social We still see large inequality gaps in several dimensions And scholars have been pointing out to a possible fragmentation of the so-called social contract And pointing to this increasing trend of opting out from public services to private services as a possible Sort of explanation of this So in this paper, we're gonna focus on education as one of these public services And as this graph shows Latin America is actually the region with the highest levels of Private school enrollment rates across the world. This is also increasing. Thus, you know further furthering the gap with higher income countries so what we do in this paper we sort of Engaged with three questions. The first one is sort of where is this happening in the region? Is this Happening everywhere in the same levels or is there some variation and we're gonna use household surveys to sort of tap into this question Then we ask why this is happening. So why are parents choosing to sell send their children to private schools instead? For this we mostly rely on very rich existing literature There has many suggestive answers for this and then finally we ask okay What are the consequences for the social contract right and we have simply suggestive descriptive evidence that? using public opinion services on this So throughout the paper we engage with three main arguments The first one is this idea by Albert Hishman of this distinction between exiting or using your voice Instead so the idea of exit is you know parents are probably dissatisfied with the quality of public schooling So they decide to those that can afford it of course decide to move to public services instead instead of using their voice so remaining in the public system and Demanding for changes and improvements in the quality of the schooling now This is especially problematic if those that are leaving public services are those that not only have more Economic power, but political power as well right so what happens then is that those that are remaining in the public system are children? Not only of lower income receiving in theory lower quality schooling But whose parents also have less resources to voice, you know their demands and and again demand for improvements in the quality of schooling The second is also this idea of this this fiscal trap that Leopoldo Ferguson explained very much nicely yesterday in in a talk where you know if also people are leaving the system They're not using public schooling anymore So they may be maybe less predisposed to continue collaborating or in this case paying taxes to finance these services They're not they're not using them anymore. So you know why do I still need to pay for things? I don't use and Then finally we also engage with the theory of social affinity or contact theory that has been referenced a lot throughout the conference actually is just this broad idea that Having interaction with out groups or people that are different from you either, you know religious nationality social economic groups Having greater interaction can lead to many positive effects, you know less prejudice more empathy And eventually a higher predisposition to collaborate for you know increasing the welfare of those groups as well So for the first question on where is this happening in the region? Again, we're going to use Households harmonized house household service provided by the IDV for seven countries Roughly in the 2000 2018 period So what we see here is just you know We're just plotting the trends of private school enrollment for school-aged children Across these seven countries Although there is a generalized, you know upper trend the levels are not the same throughout all countries, right? so in the case of Mexico for instance, it's clearly flat so in Mexico there doesn't seem to have been this, you know opting out Trend the case of Peru is the most evident one where there's a very sort of pronounced Increased trend in private school enrollment in the last 20 years And then countries sort of in the middle where there has been increased but not as pronounced And then there's also differences in levels, right? So Argentina is the country among these that has the highest levels of private school enrollment around 30 percent And Peru has reached those levels recently But this also speaks to the difference in offers of private schooling, right? So in Argentina, for instance a large majority of kids that attend private schools are attending subsidized religious schools So which makes tuition fees much more modest and accessible by lower-income households And in Peru there has been an increase in the low fee private schools Which I mean the name perfectly describes what these are schools that are again lower fees accessible for low-income households But then they may not be providing this sort of improvement in the quality of Education necessarily, but we still see households deciding to move out of the public system nonetheless So in terms of sort of what are some correlates or determinants or what which are those households that are opting out Income obviously the most intuitive one that we look at first and again, although there's always a positive association with income The level at which income starts mattering varies across countries, right? So in Argentina again We see children from households in the first say even the second desal have Comparatively speaking high rates of private school enrollments, right? Whereas in Mexico this sort of increase in private school enrollment does it begin? Up until like Income that cell eight or nine, right? That's when we see the jump before that it doesn't really happen All right, then again other countries in the middle where it's more in the income that cell five or six where we actually start seeing this increase And again the big case of Peru here the blue line is 2018 the red line is 2002 we see also there have been some changes over time They do again the most obvious one where income plays a much more important role nowadays than it did almost 20 years ago We also explore some other correlates, but for a sake of time. I'm not going to show them obviously The level of education of the head of the household matters and the direction we'd expect things like occupational categories Urban rural and this is mostly an urban phenomenon Formality also matters even keeping constant these these other variables When the head of household is a formal worker, we also see higher rates of private school enrollment Now on the second question on why this is happening Again turning to the literature. There are basically two big arguments about this perhaps the first one that comes to mind is that This idea that public schools have worse quality of education less access to resources or technology or to better salaries for teachers etc and The second one and here the work of Leopoldo Ferruz and collaborators and Maria Jose Alvarez Which they presented yesterday for for the case of Colombia is a great illustration of this non-instructional dimension, right? So parents are deciding to move to private schools because they have access to Social network social capital or some more, you know non tangible like status symbols that they can access through private school And so again the work of Leopoldo Ferruz and much recommended his book is on sale and the first floor So we can talk about commission later And and then perhaps a third thing that could fit on on either of these is the fact that Private school sometimes offer just longer school days So instead of a four-hour day It's an eight-hour day or even more days of school throughout the years right when they're in countries that have you know Strikes for public teachers private schools don't have this issue and that may also be a reason driving these Changes now and sort of to tap a little bit into the second idea of non-instructional dimension We always don't have much data on this book with our household surveys What we did is constructed this segregation index at Duncan segregation in this well much used in the literature and Basically what we're measuring is what is the proportion of poor students that would have to move from public to private schools? So that the proportion of this population is Homogeneous across these two types of schools right so the closer to one this measure is the more segregated the system is so the more the Poor are in public and the non-poor aren't in private So we construct this for Subnational units in each country so department or states that's the lowest we could go ideally we'd have this at say the neighborhood level But the data only allows us to do this So here we're plotting on the x-axis the segregation index for 2014 and the private school enrollment for 2018 Obviously, there's an association between these two because private school enrollment rates goes into the measure of the index So there's obviously a mechanic association which we'd expect them to be related But by lagging segregation for for a few years We we sort of try to break that relationship up a little bit and again as we'd expect in what we see is in context of higher segregation we also see higher rates of private school enrollment and then we we we regress We have a regression where we're predicting private school enrollment rates and we interact Income with these segregation rates and even though in general again, we see this positive trend so in context of Greater segregation the role of income is more pronounced for that decision to leave public schools or in other words Where there's low segregation or where there's a better mix of poor and non-poor students in in schools Then income is not such an important sort of the determinants of this decision of where you're sending your school your kid Okay, and then finally with this last question of Does this matter for the the social contract? So for this we're turning to public opinion data Latino Ironman through 2011 and La Pop 2016 both surveys include a question Of whether the respondents attended private school back in the day So we're going to be looking at adults comparing adults that attended private versus public schools When they were younger not at parents who decide to send their children to private or public schools now of course, there's huge problems degenerative problems here and We can't really make any causal claims Simply descriptive with this observational data we have but we hope that at least by the fact that this is so the treatment happened a Long time ago it was not sort of in the control of these adults, right? It's a decision that was made for them when they were younger by their parents So there there's that So what we see then is first what we compare is Opinions about the quality of public education In these two groups again adults that attended public or private schools when they were younger And what we see is sort of a negative association here So those that attended private schools tend to have worse Evaluations of public school systems just that the quality in general is worse and the teachers in the public system Don't have the tools or the knowledge to teach kids appropriately And then sort of in line with this idea of the fiscal trap sort of that all people that aren't using these systems Maybe less predisposed to to collaborate We only have one question that is somewhat suggestive of this So they ask people whether they think sort of in a spectrum of who is responsible for paying for public schools Either the state or the family and we see that those adults that attended private school tend to Say that the family is more responsible for this So perhaps some sort of suggestion that this shouldn't be paid with public funds that we're all contributing to And then finally, I think perhaps most interesting with in line with this contact theory The bulk of this literature is mostly say about raised or in non-school settings There's little that talks about interaction with other social economic groups in a school setting But there's at least two very important papers here one from londonio velez this year was actually Evaluating a program here from from Colombia called Serpilopaga Which basically the state would give scholarships to low-income students to attend Universities like like this one where we're in now and she does find that actually Hiring comes students when they have this increased interaction with low-income students They're predispositioned to collaborate with redistribution and support redistribution increases Sort of their ideas about income distributions also improve And then another paper from India, which is actually for school-aged children again a similar initiative where lower-income students are introduced to Sort of high-income or elite schools and we see that these students as they belong to these more mixed Social economic groups increase their pro-social behavior Altruistic behavior right there for instance more willing to stay after school to raise money for poor kids and things like that So What we could do is we just simply Again regressed private school with these two classic questions on support for redistribution So the most important one is this question on do you think the state should implement strong policies to reduce inequality? This date actually comes from La Pop and we only have three three countries that that included this question So it would be nice to have this in the future So so again just Chile Ecuador in in Uruguay, but we see again those that attended private schools tend to have lower support of state redistributive efforts So finally just to wrap up so basically what we try to do in this paper is simply give sort of an Idea of where this opting out is happening in public schooling Why this may be the case and again some suggestions of what are the consequences for? redistributive behaviors We are extending this to health as well So and I mean our very basic preliminary evidence At least in this last aspect suggests that the effects are not as strong This is I mean this this makes sense right your interaction with the health system is much less frequent and intense Then then your interaction with the school system and also as we've learned throughout this conference your your experiences in those Formative years can have huge consequences in the future including for political attitudes, but nonetheless interesting to to compare How opting out from different services works? Yes, that's all. Thank you very much