Biblioteca

This paper assesses the effect of teachers on the gender gap in student test scores.
It combines different empirical strategies from the value-added and labor economics
literature to estimate teacher value-added and its contribution to the math and reading
gender gaps. We use rich administrative data from Chile, that allows us to follow
teachers through different classes in different years. Our main findings indicate that
teachers explain up to 18% of student test score variance and help reduce the gender
gap in math by 16.9%. The reduction in the math gender gap is greater in voucher
schools (16.1%), among students with more educated mothers (24%) and among those
with female math teachers (32.2%). We provide evidence supporting a within-class
effect instead of sorting (between-class effect). We conduct several tests and robustness
checks to assess the reliability of our findings.