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One promise of school voucher reform is that parents can move outside their school districts without relocating their homes. It has been argued that given patterns of neighborhood segregation and overlapping school districts, the possibility of such mobility makes voucher reform highly desirable. However, we do not know whether parents living in disadvantaged neighborhoods would or could leave the closest school option for better schools in different neighborhoods or not if they were in a universal school voucher system. This paper investigates the effects of neighborhood and parental characteristics on parents’ decision to become mobile. Because of the limited nature of voucher experiments in the US, the paper uses the Chilean universal school voucher system, the structure of which closely parallels the Milton Friedman’s (1958) original proposal of school vouchers. The data come from a panel of K-12 parents in Santiago, Chile. The paper uses survey items on the schools parents considered before the enrollment decision, and objective data on the academic indicators of these schools, their neighborhood characteristics, as well as the parents’ neighborhood and the academic indicators of their neighborhood schools. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interaction in social networks might help citizens overcome their decisional weaknesses. Research on how citizens evaluate policies and candidates has shown that evaluations can be swayed by many factors such as mood, emotions, and affect. The resulting volatility in citizens’ evaluations has been a reason for worry from a deliberative democracy perspective. Social networks might bridge the gap between easily “swayed” citizens and the requirements of deliberative democracy. In this paper we investigate the effect of social network quality on the thought processes of citizens making policy evaluations. We investigate the effect of network coherence, extent, and sophistication on the likelihood of citizens to engage in coherent thinking about policies and their depth of reasoning in environments where affect laden stimuli are present. To that end, we first investigate the extent to which affective subliminal stimuli change the thought processes in an experiment where subjects evaluate policies, and then examine the effect of the social network quality on the extent to which subjects become susceptible to subliminal effects in their reasoning about specific policy areas such as energy or immigration. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Choice systems are believed to increase satisfaction with public services by giving citizens the chance to choose the provider. This paper tests the basic assumption of citizen mobility in the context of the Chilean school choice system. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the nature of school competition and the effect of the competitive environment on social stratification through a study of the marketing activities of schools in Santiago, Chile. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper develops a game theoretic model of institutional change, which confirms the political theory of endogenous institutional change outlined in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper develops a political theory of endogeneous institutional change that emphasizes associational relations within families of institutions and the interactive properties of a given institutional mix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]