This paper examines the causal impact of school disruption during the COVID-19 pandemic on youth crime in Ecuador. Leveraging administrative arrest records matched by location to school-level data, I identify, for each grade--cohort, the schools that experienced higher dropout in 2020 and implement a difference-in-differences framework. The results show that school disruption increased arrest rates for 15- and 16-year-olds by 12.4 percent in 2021 and 10.5 percent in 2022, with the strongest effects for cohorts born between 2004 and 2007. The impacts are heterogeneous across gender, urban and rural areas, exposure to organized crime, and local labor market conditions. In addition, school disruption had persistent effects on prison and homicide rates, underscoring the dynamic dimension of disrupted human capital accumulation. Together, these findings demonstrate that educational continuity plays a central role in preventing youth violence, particularly where alternative legal opportunities are limited.

This paper examines the effects of Ecuador's 2012 higher education reform on university enrolment. We exploit discontinuities in age cohorts and the timing of the announcement of the reform to implement a difference-in-differences approach. Overall, we find that the reform had a detrimental effect on the likelihood of an individual enrolling in a university immediately after completing high school.  Our results suggest that the exam acted as a barrier, reducing university enrolment in the first year of the reform by 8 percentage points (p.p.), a 31% decrease with respect to the pre-treatment period. This effect was heterogeneous, disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations, including women, rural residents, and the poor, thereby increasing inequalities in access to higher education.  

The objective of this study is to employ a cooperative game model to elucidate the dynamics through which a society, characterized by ethnic fragmentation, determines both the scope and language of public education provision. Within this framework, the labor market is segmented into formal and informal sectors, wherein individuals engaged in formal employment contribute taxes, whereas those in informal employment do not. Formal sector wages surpass those of the informal sector, and the likelihood of securing a formal job hinges on one's educational attainment.