Essays on economics of education and inequality

El documento resume los resultados de los tres ensayos sobre economía de la educación y de igualdad de oportunidades que se realizaron para el caso de Colombia.

I Don`t Want to Present the ECAES! Quality of Education in Health Careers

This paper makes a reflection about a panorama of higher education quality, and referring to that it reviews and discusses what should be ongoing, what was made in history and what is today in curse, that is the basic strategies used by the government to improve higher education. An emphasis is made on higher education quality tests (ECAES, in Spanish) for health careers, in order to solve some doubts in students and teachers about those tests. My excuses to the reader for often using first person and some references of personal interviews or unprinted conferences.

On the design of education conditional cash transfer programs and non education outcomes: the case of teenage pregnancy

We investigate the effect of education Conditional Cash Transfer programs (CCTs) on teenage pregnancy. Our main concern is with how the size and sign of the effect may depend on the design of the program. Using a simple model we show that an education CCT that conditions renewal on school performance reduces teenage pregnancy; the program can increase teenage pregnancy if it does not condition on school performance. Then, using an original data base, we estimate the causal impact on teenage pregnancy of two education CCTs implemented in Bogot´a (Subsidio Educativo, SE, and Familias en Acci´on, FA); both programs differ particularly on whether school success is a condition for renewal or not. We show that SE has negative average effect on teenage pregnancy while FA has a null average effect. We also find that SE has either null or no effect for adolescents in all age and grade groups while FA has positive, null or negative effects for adolescents in different age and grade groups. Since SE conditions renewal on school success and FA does not, we can argue that the empirical results are consistent with the predictions of our model and that conditioning renewal of the subsidy on school success crucially determines the effect of the subsidy on teenage pregnancy

Complicaciones de la preeclampsia severa y su relación con variables demográficas y obstétricas

Introducción: La preeclampsia severa es una de las principales patologías que afectan a las mujeres embarazadas, sus complicaciones tienen un alto impacto en la salud del binomio madre-hijo. Materiales y métodos: Se realizo una serie de casos, durante un periodo de 1 año se revisaron las historias clínicas de las pacientes que ingresaron a la unidad de cuidado intensivo obstétrico de la Clínica Orquídeas, con diagnóstico de preeclampsia severa. Se describieron los datos demográficos y las complicaciones. Se realizó análisis univariado con las variables de interés y se calcularon diferencias significativas por medio del test exacto de Fisher. Resultados: Se registraron 196 pacientes con preeclampsia severa en el periodo de estudio. Las complicaciones mas frecuentes fueron síndrome HELLP (30,6%), insuficiencia renal aguda (16,3%) y edema pulmonar (10,2%); el ingreso de las pacientes con preeclampsia severa a la UCIO en embarazo aumenta el riesgo de sufrir complicaciones. El síndrome de HELLP se presento con mayor frecuencia en pacientes que realizaron 6 o mas controles prenatales (p=0.066). Discusión: Los resultados evidencian una prevalencia de preeclampsia severa mayor que la observada por otros autores, probablemente por ser una UCI exclusivamente obstétrica. Las complicaciones mas frecuentes son concordantes con otros estudios publicados. El mayor riesgo de complicaciones asociadas en pacientes que ingresan embarazadas a la UCIO podría estar en relación a la severidad de la patología. Se requieren estudios analíticos para establecer asociaciones entre cada una de las complicaciones y sus factores condicionantes.

The High Education Teacher, an Agent of Moral Development

The article shows the classroom like an workplace to move moral development, from the relationship between students and professors in the university atmosphere. It proposes elements to take to the practice the ethics education a transverse curriculum line. It assumes the ethics, from a plural perspective, founded on the knowledge and the human action. It joins the integral formation with the conceptions of education, curriculum, pedagogical models and methodologies of education. It proposes actions to demonstrate the commitment of the professor with the integral formation. Finally, concludes that the professor is agent of moral development and that in the classroom is constructed: identity, autonomy and responsibility, from open and plural relation between professors and students and between these and the knowledge.

The design of optimal education policies when individuals differ in inherited wealth and ability

In this paper I consider the role of education poli-cies in redistribution of income when individuals differ in two aspects: ability and inherited wealth. I discuss the extent to which the rules that emerge in unidimensional settings apply also in the bidimen-sional setting considered in this paper. The main conclusion is that, subject to some qualifi cations, the same type of rules that determine optimal education policies when only ability heterogeneity is considered apply to the case where both parameters of heterogeneity are considered. The qualifi cations pertain to the implementation of the optimal alloca-tion of resources to education and not the way the optimal allocations fi rst- and second-best differ.

Beyond the mincer equation: the internal rate of return to higher education in Colombia

In order to present an estimation of the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) to higher education in Colombia we take advantage of the methodological approach provided by Heckman, Lochner and Todd (2005). Trying to overcome the criticism that surrounds interpretations of the education coefficient of Mincer equations as being the rate of return to investments in education we develop a more structured approach of estimation, which controls for selection bias, includes more accurate measures of labor income and the role of education costs and income taxes. Our results implied a lower rate of return than the ones found in the Colombian literature and show that the Internal Rate of Return for higher education in Colombia lies somewhere between 0.074 and 0.128. The results vary according to the year analyzed and individual’s gender. This last result reinforces considerations regarding gender discrimination in the Colombian labor market.