09 de January, 2025

FEN Uchile Researchers Awarded Prestigious Initiation Grants for Innovative Research Projects

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The Chilean National Agency for Research and Development (ANID) has announced the results of the 2025 Fondecyt Initiation competition. Fondecyt is a prestigious Chilean funding program that supports groundbreaking scientific and technological research. It provides financial grants to young researchers to advance their projects and contribute to the development of knowledge. Among the three winning projects, three are led by professors from the Department of Economics (DECON) at the University of Chile, addressing a diverse range of topics: how supply shocks affect buyer behavior in oligopsonistic markets, whether a cleaner energy grid reduces educational inequalities, and the effects of applying educational conditions in cash transfer programs in a developing country.

To foster and strengthen the development of excellent scientific and technological research, ANID funds projects led by young academics. This year, the winners include José Manuel Paz y Miño, Nathaly Rivera, and Mariana Zerpa, professors from DECON.

In "Buyer Conduct and Supply Shocks: Evidence from Uruguayan Meatpacking Firms," Professor Paz y Miño investigates how supply shocks affect buyer behavior in markets with oligopsonistic power. Specifically, the project aims to determine whether changes in buyer behavior amplify or mitigate the effects of supply shocks and their distributive impacts. Unlike typical studies, the research focuses not on final goods markets but on the behavior of buyers in input markets, which can alter the effects of exogenous supply shocks.
Focusing on the Uruguayan meat industry between 2009 and 2019, the study looks at cattle breeders, beef producers, and meat processing plants. The analysis takes advantage of a period of low cattle imports from Turkey (2013-2015), which led to a drop in input prices for meat processors, creating an exogenous supply shock. This episode is used to estimate whether the behavior of meat processors changed as a result.

The findings are relevant for competition authorities, as they highlight how market conditions influence buyer behavior, an aspect that is often difficult to identify.

Professor Nathaly Rivera’s research, "Clean Energy, Air Quality, and Educational Equity: Examining the Impact of Renewable Integration on Schooling Disparities in Chile," explores whether a cleaner energy grid reduces educational inequalities. She examines the impact of air pollution from thermal plants on students in nearby schools, noting that pollution disproportionately affects lower-income communities. This suggests that the transition to renewable energy could reduce these inequalities. However, improvements in air quality are not guaranteed due to the intermittency of renewable sources.
Since 2010, renewable energy in Chile has grown significantly due to regulatory incentives. In this context, Rivera investigates how additional renewable capacity has reduced thermal generation and, consequently, pollution. She seeks to evaluate how this reduction in pollution influences school attendance and academic performance, particularly for public school students who would be the primary beneficiaries of improved air quality.

This project contributes to the understanding of air quality improvements—and not just deterioration—and its short- and long-term effects on education in a developing country. It also adds to the debate on environmental justice and public policy design.

Finally, Professor Mariana Zerpa’s research, "Effects of Enforcement of Educational Conditionalities in Conditional Cash Transfer Programs," focuses on conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, widely used in developing countries to reduce intergenerational poverty transmission and promote human capital accumulation. These programs often require families to meet educational and health conditions for their children, though there is debate about their necessity. While these conditions can improve outcomes, their implementation may exclude the most vulnerable families.
Zerpa’s project examines the effects of enforcing educational conditions in Uruguay’s Family Allowance Program – Equity Plan (AFAM-PE). In the program’s early years, compliance with conditions was not monitored, but in 2013, monitoring began, resulting in mass suspension of benefits for non-compliance.

The research uses a quasi-experimental strategy based on eligibility criteria for the program and variations in exposure to monitoring. This allows for a comparison of outcomes between eligible and ineligible applicants before and after the monitoring of educational conditions. The analysis uses administrative data from beneficiaries, school and employment records, and aims to provide evidence on the role of conditionalities in the effectiveness of transfer programs.