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Police Violence, Student Protests, and Educational Performance

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2024 106(3), 712-727
Abstract We study the protest behavior of teenagers linked to a student killed by a stray bullet coming from a policeman in Chile. We use administrative data to follow the schoolmates of the victim and those living near the shooting on hundreds of protest and nonprotest days. We find that police violence causes lower protest participation in street rallies but more adherence to test boycotts. These effects appear among schoolmates of the victim and not among students living near the killing. Negative educational consequences suffered by the schoolmates combined with previous results suggest that psychological mechanisms are a plausible explanation.

The Economics of the Public Option: Evidence from Local Pharmaceutical Markets

American Economic Review 2024 114(3), 615-644 open access
We study the effects of competition by state-owned firms, leveraging the decentralized entry of public pharmacies to local markets in Chile. Public pharmacies sell the same drugs at a third of private pharmacy prices, because of stronger upstream bargaining and market power in the private sector, but are of lower quality. Public pharmacies induced market segmentation and price increases in the private sector, which benefited the switchers to the public option but harmed the stayers. The countrywide entry of public pharmacies would reduce yearly consumer drug expenditure by 1.6 percent. (JEL D22, I18, L32, L65, O14)