Effects of Enhanced Legal Aid in Child Welfare: Evidence from a Randomized Trial of Mi Abogado

This experimental evaluation is due to the efforts of the Experimental Policy Initiative of the Department of Expenditure Review of the Chilean Budget Office. We thank Josefa Aguirre, Anna Aizer, Bocar Ba, Jason Baron, Patrick Bayer, Pablo Celhay, Janet Currie, Emilio Depetris-Chauvin, Maria Fitzpatrick, Francisco Gallego, Joseph Hotz, Caroline Hoxby, Jeanne Lafortune, Doug Miller, Derek Neal, Roberto Rigobon, and Michael Whinston, and as well as participants in seminars at Duke University, the Frisch Centre for Economic Research, Georgetown University, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, MIT Sloan, the NBER Program on Children, the University of Bergen, and the University of Oslo, for helpful comments. Catalina Bravo, Carolina De Iruarrizaga, Benjamín Echecopar, and Antonia Sanhueza provided excellent research assistance. Francisca de Iruarrizaga provided valuable insights into the child protection system in Chile. We also thank Verónica Pincheira and the rest of the team from the Ministry of Justice for all their support and contributions to the evaluation project. We are grateful to the Supreme Court of Chile and Fabiola González, Omar Manriquez, and Ricardo Tucas for their excellent and generous work in constructing the justice-system databases. We thank Karina Vega from Servicio Nacional de Menores for helping in facilitating and preparing their data. We thank the Studies Department of the Ministry of Education for making available data from the education system. We thank Lee Ullman and the MIT Sloan Latin America Office for financial support of this collaboration. RCT ID: AEARCTR-0004160. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• data appendix
• randomized controlled trials registry entry