Vitor Azevedo Pereira.

23/08/2016

Orientador: Claudio Ferraz.

Banca: Gustavo Gonzaga. Miguel Nathan Foguel. Naércio Aquino Menezes Filho. Ricardo Madeira.

From early childhood to high school: Three essays on the economics of education

Nível: Doutorado

In the first chapter, we analyze the impact of a community based preschool program on children’s development and schooling in rural Mozambique. Preschools were randomly assigned to 30 out of 76 eligible communities in the study area. Children who attend preschool experience gains in cognitive development, communication, fine motor skills and socio-emotional skills, scoring 0.37 standard deviations higher on a child development screening test. Preschoolers are 21 percentage points more likely to be enrolled in primary school and are 14.9 percentage points more likely to enroll at the appropriate age. The preschool intervention also had positive spillovers on the schooling of older siblings and labor supply of caregivers. At a cost of about $3 dollars per child per month, these results suggest that community led preschools are a promising policy option for helping children meet their development potential. 

In the second chapter, I study the impacts of the Renda Melhor Jovem Program, an attainment award targeted to disadvantaged secondary students in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. While high school attainment awards have recently been implemented in many places in Latin America, there is still little evidence on whether they can positively impact students’ outcomes when implemented at scale. By exploiting the phased in expansion of the program, I find that program eligibility substantially decreases dropout and increases test scores and high school completion. The program is particularly effective for boys and students with high risks of dropping out. 

In the third chapter, we analyze an empirical case of loss aversion in public policy. While previous papers have identified evidence of loss aversion in laboratory experiments or in sports such as basketball or golf, it is still unclear whether these findings could generalize to other domains. We test for loss aversion by analyzing teacher reactions to receiving a bonus that is based on a continuous underlying measure of school performance. As there are no sanctions or rewards for teachers or schools and the index of school performance is publicly available, winning or losing the bonus should introduce no new information and, consequently, should generate no reactions by teachers. Consistent with loss aversion, however, we find sizable improvements on student scores at schools failing to receive the bonus by a little margin. We investigate the mechanisms behind this results and we find significant changes in teachers’ pedagogical practices. Finally, contrary to claims that behavioral biases should be attenuated by experienced and informed agents, we find stronger results for experienced principals and for schools with high proportion of teachers who report understanding the teacher bonus rules.