Description:

Matteo Magnaricotte, joint with Jose Flor Toro (Northwestern University): "Entry, Access and Quality Provision in the Peruvian Higher Education Market"

Abstract: "While the rapid expansion of enrollment in higher education in Latin America has been seen positively, it has also been coupled with lowering quality indicators, among other problems. In an extreme reaction to these issues, the Peruvian government issued a moratorium on new colleges and new branches of existing ones in 2012, after a doubling in the number of suppliers in the preceding decade. We argue this offers a good setting to understand the effects of entry on welfare in the higher education industry, featuring asymmetric information and endogenous quality decisions of the providers. We present reduced form evidence as motivation for further exploration of the topic. Given the national scale of the measure, we will discuss estimating a structural model as next step."