Fernando Ochoa

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.