Evaluating the Impact of School Decentralization on Educational Quality

Abstract

In this paper, we evaluate the effect of secondary school decentralization on educational quality. Between 1992 and 1994, the Argentine national government transferred all its dependent secondary schools to the provincial governments.2 This political experiment generated an exogenous variation in the jurisdiction of secondary school administration across time and space. We exploit this instrument to identify the causal effect of school decentralization on educational quality, measured by the outcome of a standardized test in Spanish and mathematics administered to students in their final year of secondary school.