We study the labor market returns to a state-guaranteed loan used to finance university degrees in Chile. Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that marginally eligible students forgo vocational education in favor of university education but reduce their probability of graduation. Even though university loan takers accumulate more student debt, their labor market outcomes are not different from those of ineligible students. We find suggestive evidence that the lower quality of the receiving institutions accounts for these results. Finally, we extrapolate the effects away from the eligibility cutoff and show that supramarginal students benefit from this policy.

We study whether the quality of managers can affect public service provision in the context of public health. Using novel data from public hospitals in Chile, we show how the introduction of a competitive recruitment system and better pay for public hospital CEOs reduced hospital mortality by 8 percent. The effect is not explained by a change in patient composition. We find that the policy changed the pool of CEOs by displacing doctors with no management training in favor of CEOs who had studied management. Productivity improvements were driven by hospitals that recruited higher quality CEOs.