Education system response to an extreme shock analyzing the short, medium and long-term impact of the stronger earthquake in Chile

Abstract

Education acts as a crucial engine for economic growth. However, in Chile, a country highly susceptible to earthquakes, these natural hazards threaten to undermine the benefits of an educated population. Given the limited research in this area, this article contributes by analyzing the short-, medium-, and long-term effects of one of the major earthquakes that struck Chile in 2010 on attendance rates across all educational levels. The study employs a robust identification strategy that integrates earthquake intensity measures with residential data and housing damage information to explore variations in exposure by district at the time of the quake. The methodology facilitates a comparative analysis of the earthquake's effects across cities with varying Peak Ground Acceleration (PGA) levels and associated housing damage. Various estimation methods and sensitivity checks are implemented to validate the underlying hypotheses. The negative impact of the BioBío earthquake is evident in both the short term (within months of the event) and the medium term (one year following the earthquake), with high school and college students being the most severely affected, even three to five years after the disaster. However, this effect dissipates by 2017. Furthermore, based on the conducted tests, the detrimental effects of the earthquake and tsunami on educational attendance rates become significant only when PGA and housing damage reach extremely high levels. In contrast, no significant effects are observed at lower levels of either variable. Based on the hypotheses examined, several policy recommendations are proposed.