This paper investigates the causal impact of reduced school attendance on youth criminal behavior in Ecuador. Leveraging administrative data on arrests and incarceration, I exploit variation in high school dropout rates across cohorts and cantons during the COVID-19 pandemic, implementing a difference-in-differences framework with a continuous treatment. The results indicate that pandemic-induced declines in school attendance led to a significant increase in youth crime: incarceration rates rose by 20.8 percent among high school cohorts in cantons with elevated dropout rates, relative to those with stable enrollment. The effect is more pronounced in areas with greater exposure to organized crime, driven in part by the post-2017 surge in cocaine production in Colombia. Importantly, the relationship emerges only after 2020, suggesting that the pandemic-induced labor supply shock was a necessary condition for the demand shock from organized crime to translate into higher youth criminality.

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 with multiple time periods 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 the reform was did not decrease congestion in the access to university. Moreover, our results show significant variation by population subgroups, with some groups affected more than others, hence increasing inequalities in access to tertiary education. We analyze mechanisms such as internal migration to determine if the reform led students to migrate from congested provinces to less congested ones. Our findings indicate that the reform did not result in such migration.

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.