Cognitive, social, and emotional development throughout life is contingent to affordances of the environments in which individuals develop. These abilities are the result of multiple interactions with our ecosystem and the people that surround us. Namely, chronic exposure to violence has been shown to tamper positive human development. These potential negative consequences are particularly challenging in Colombia, a country stricken by more than five decades of civil conflict. In this paper, we evaluate the extent in which chronic exposure to violence —measured at the municipality level— affects children and adolescent’s social and emotional development. Our findings indicate that exposure to violence —particularly homicides— has an important negative association with unique measures of: (i) empathy, (ii) subjective beliefs on the acceptability of the use of violence, and (iii) non-confrontational reactions when provoked, all measured in a national standardized test. Additionally, we observe that the schools in the most violent municipalities are precisely the ones that have less resources that moderate the association between skill development and violence.

This study analyses the labor market outcomes from individuals who graduated from tertiary education in Colombia taking hand of administrative records of the Colombian Labor Market Observatory for Education between years 2007 and 2011. These labor market outcomes were measured as the differences in wages associated with different degrees of tertiary education by institution. An unordered decision model that includes individual’s cognitive abilities approximated through standardized test scores (Saber 11) was applied with the aim to determine which tertiary educational degree would have provided the highest labor market outcomes to the individual given his characteristics. We implemented the quasi-experimental technique of propensity score matching as empirical strategy to control for the individual’s self-selection while making the decision of which tertiary degree to attend and to compare the labor market outcomes of each tertiary degree within each institution. Our main findings show that the more education accumulation, the higher the starting salary an individual would receive in the formal labor market, results aligned with previous research.

We assess inequality of opportunity in educational achievement in six Latin American countries, employing two waves of PISA data (2006 and 2009). By means of a non-parametric approach using a decomposable inequality index, GE(0), we rank countries according to their degree of inequality of opportunity. We work with alternative characterizations of types: school type (public or private), gender, parental education, and combinations of those variables. We calculate incremental contributions of each set of circumstances to inequality. We provide rankings of countries based on unconditional inequalities (using conventional indices) and on conditional inequalities (EOp indices), and the two sets of rankings do not always coincide. Inequality of opportunities range from less than 1% to up to 27%, with substantial heterogeneity according to the year, the country, the subject and the specification of circumstances. Robustness checks based on bootstrap and the use of an alternative index conform most of the initial results.