Estimated Impact of School Closures in Chile During 2019

Data and do file required to reproduce our results of the paper "Estimated Impact of School Closures in Chile During 2019" In 2019 several schools in Chile had prolonged interruptions in their classes due to two unusual events. One was an extended teachers’ strike, and the other was a series of violent nationwide protests, known as the October Outbreak. Using the difference-in-differences approach, we estimated the effect these events had on student performance, attendance, and the rate of students who withdrew or were transferred from their schools that year. The study considers elementary and high-school students who are in traditional education (this is, we exclude students from adult education formats, night-shift students, and students from special-education-only schools). We created two analytical samples. The first one is at the student level and we use it to estimate the effect of closures on GPA, attendance, and the rate of students who were withdrawn or transferred from schools. The second sample is at the school level and we use it to measure the effect of closures on the results of the 8th grade SIMCE standardized test. The Rendimiento.dta and Simce.dta databases were built with public information available at: https://informacionestadistica.agenciaeducacion.cl/#/bases and https://datosabiertos.mineduc.cl/ The Ministry of Education there is information gathered by the Mineduc of schools that adhered to the stoppage during 2019, as well as the days of classes lost by each school due to the riots of that year after October 18th. This information can be crossed with the other databases we use through a unique school identifier.