School Management and Sexual Behavior of Teenagers

This paper asks whether school based management may help reducing risky sexual behavior of teenagers. For this purpose, we use student level data from Bogota to identify students from Concession School (CS), who are enrolled in public education system with a more school management autonomy at school level, and to compare them with those students at the traditional public education system. We use propensity score matching methods to have a comparable sample between pupils at CS and traditional schools. Our results show that on average the behavior of students from CS do not have a sexual behavior that differs from those in traditional public schools except for boys in CS who have a lower probability of being sexual active. However, there are important differences when heterogeneity is considered. For example, we find that CS where girls per boy’s ratio is higher have lower teenage pregnancy rates than public schools with also high girls per boy’s ratios. We also find that teachers' human capital, teacher-pupil ratio or whether school offers sexual education are also related to statistically significant differences between CS and traditional public schools.

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