PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Alcaino, Manuel
AU  - Argote, Pablo
TI  - Politics Matter: How Political Experience Mitigates Learning Losses Caused by Natural Disasters
AID  - 10.7758/RSF.2024.10.1.08
DP  - 2024 Jan 01
TA  - RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences
PG  - 181--204
VI  - 10
IP  - 1
4099  - http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/10/1/181.short
4100  - http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/10/1/181.full
AB  - Growing evidence warns about the detrimental effects of the stress induced by natural disasters on learning outcomes. Yet less is known about how political leadership could mitigate the adverse exposure to these events. Exploiting a natural experiment—the massive 2010 earthquake in Chile—as an exogenous shock and using fine-grained student data, we find that school disruption has a short and long-term impact on students’ test scores. Moreover, our results indicate that learning losses were more pronounced in municipalities with a first-term mayor, in contrast to a nonsignificant effect in municipalities with a reelected one. We show that one of the pathways accounting for these effects is the ability of experienced bureaucrats to mobilize educational resources, highlighting the relevance of managerial capacities in times of crisis.