@EdWorkingPaper{ai25-1288,
title = "The impact of increasing school resources on peer victimization: Evidence from targeted funding on low-income families in Chile",
author = "Matias Martinez",
institution = "Annenberg Institute at Brown University",
number = "1288",
year = "2025",
month = "September",
URL = "http://www.edworkingpapers.com/ai25-1288",
abstract = {While a large body of literature has examined the impact of school spending on academic outcomes, far less is known about its effect on students’ socioemotional development and school experiences. This study contributes to narrowing this gap by evaluating the impact of a nationwide school finance reform in Chile on peer victimization in high schools. The reform significantly increased school revenues by providing targeted funding for low-income students, with some school budgets growing by up to 60%. Using a panel of approximately 600 high schools from 2006 to 2018, I followed two main empirical strategies to causally evaluate the impact of this policy. First, Difference-in-Differences models designed to identify intertemporal effects and to evaluate continuous treatments show that the reform’s impact grew over time, with significant reductions in peer victimization emerging after four years of exposure and concentrating in the 2016–2018 period when funding increases were largest. Second, to isolate the causal effect of funding, I used a two-stage least squares model, instrumenting for per-pupil revenues with plausibly exogenous variation from the reform’s funding formula: the interaction between a school’s pre-reform share of low-income students and the years since the policy’s onset. The results indicate that a 10% increase in per-student revenue leads to a reduction in overall peer victimization of 7% to 10% from baseline levels. These reductions are more consistent for physical, verbal, and social aggression and less robust for online victimization. The effects on peer victimization are stronger in coeducational schools and those with a higher proportion of male students. Overall, these findings demonstrate that targeted educational investments matter not only to improve academic achievement but also the socioemotional well-being of students.},
}