Essays on human capital development and effective public policy delivery in Peru

This thesis follows the format of an integrated thesis and consists of an introduction and three substantive chapters that relate broadly to the theme of human capital development and, more concretely, to the research areas of economics of education, economics of incentives and health economics in the context of low-and-middle-income countries.
Chapter 1 explores whether better management of school violence translates into improvements in the student’s experience at school. The chapter examines the impacts of a large-scale government intervention that aimed to improve the school heads’ skills to manage school violence in Peru. I exploit the eligibility rules used to select beneficiary schools and use a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to estimate the short-term impacts of the intervention on violence and education-related outcomes. The findings show that the likelihood of reporting violence increased by 37 percentage points and that the number of reports of violence also rose among eligible schools. Using unique administrative, qualitative, and primary data, I find suggestive evidence that the documented rise in reports of violence is primarily due to shifts in reporting behaviour rather than a greater incidence of school violence. Upon exploring the short-term impacts on education-related outcomes, I find the intervention reduced the student’s likelihood of switching schools by three percentage points. These findings add to our understanding of the benefits of investing in school staff skills that contribute to the creation of safer learning environments.
Chapter 2 studies the relationship between school staff’ alignment with the goals of training interventions and school staff performance. The school staff that is beneficiary of training interventions might show initial enthusiasm toward capacity building. However, the training might not sink in deep and be put into practice if the school principals are misaligned with the goals and priorities of the intervention. I explore this empirically in the context of a Peruvian training intervention where principals had discretionary power over their decisions. Using novel data, I first find that higher alignment with the intervention is strongly associated with better school principals’ performance (measured using an index of task completion). Second, I find that another important predictor of task completion is the overall management practices of the school, with the findings pointing to the fact that in schools that have worse management practices, higher alignment with the intervention matters more. The chapter contributes to our understanding of the role of alignment as a non-pecuniary source of motivation and points to the importance of considering this factor when designing and evaluating professional development policies.
Chapter 3 chapter shifts the attention to health. Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) have been part of the social protection strategy of many low-and-middle-income countries for more than 20 years. Given their long-standing role in the policy agenda, this chapter will study the persistence of their effects on the utilization of preventive child and maternal health services. The chapter highlights that CCTs are generally implemented in contexts of heterogeneous health supply conditions, and hence, it also examines the extent to which unequal geographic accessibility to health facilities determines the effectiveness of CCTs. I study this in the context of a Peruvian CCT called Juntos and exploit the variation in the timing of treatment to estimate the impacts of Juntos using a differences in differences analytical framework. I find that positive short-term effects in the utilization of health services are persistent across a period of 10 years and even become larger the longer the exposure to the CCT. I observe this both for health services directly targeted by the CCT and services that were not. Moreover, I find that the CCT had bigger effects in districts with more disadvantageous geographic accessibility to health facilities, suggesting that the CCT contributed to encouraging attendance at health facilities despite the supply conditions. My findings are partly explained by the fact that these districts had larger space for improvement at baseline.

Keywords: Utilization of health services
Economics of education
School violence
Conditional cash transfers
Program effectiveness
School management and alignment
Advisor: Krishnan, P