Fernando Ochoa

Housing vouchers are a common policy for expanding access to homeownership, yet their effectiveness is called into question due to concerns over subsidies increasing housing prices and being poorly targeted. I study the equilibrium and distributional effects of homeownership vouchers through the case of Santiago's DS1 program, which subsidizes 7% of the city's transactions and is the largest such program in the OECD. I build an equilibrium model of a housing market with targeted and rationed homeownership vouchers. The model features endogenous voucher take-up and supply responses through existing unit sales and new construction. I estimate the model using novel data on voucher applications and usage, linked to the universe of real estate transactions and new development surveys. I evaluate the equilibrium impacts of the program relative to a scenario without the program, finding that it increases homeownership rates while raising prices. New development plays a significant role in dampening price inflation by increasing the supply of affordable units. Overall, I estimate that each dollar spent yields 61 cents in surplus. Although half of policy spending is transferred to beneficiaries, pecuniary externalities harm non-beneficiaries, reducing net consumer transfers to 25 cents per dollar spent. Counterfactual policies reveal a trade-off between targeting and price pass-through: policies that reduce price pass-through worsen targeting, as assistance goes to households more likely to become homeowners without the program.

This paper asks how search costs, limited awareness of schools, misperceptions of schools' attributes, and inaccurate beliefs over unknown schools affect families' search and application decisions in Chile's nationwide school choice process. We combine novel data on search activity with a panel of household surveys, administrative application data, randomized information experiments, and a model of demand and sequential search with subjective beliefs. Descriptively, households hold inaccurate beliefs and misperceptions along multiple dimensions which distort the perceived returns to search. Most importantly, they do not know all schools, and misperceive quality ratings of the schools they know and like. Improving the search technology would raise households' search effort and welfare. Correcting misperceptions about known schools' observables would cause students to match to schools with higher quality, equal to what can be achieved under a full-information benchmark. Models without misperceptions would incorrectly predict quality reductions.

We study how physical access to ChileAtiende—Chile's nationwide one-stop service platform—shapes take-up of social programs, with a focus on housing subsidies. We assemble a national, multi-year panel that links (i) the timing and location of ChileAtiende office openings/closures and office-level visit logs, (ii) administrative records on applications and awards for major benefits (with DS01 housing subsidies as a core case), (iii) beneficiary origin and destination addresses to measure distance to the nearest office, and (iv) dated policy announcements that plausibly shift information demand. Our central question is whether improved proximity to an office increases applications and awards—and for whom—versus simply reallocating demand across channels. We test whether effects are stronger for households living nearer (vs. farther) to offices, around office openings, and in response to salient national announcements. The design leverages staggered office rollouts and announcement timing in a difference-in-differences framework with granular location and time fixed effects.