Ensaios sobre economia da educação no Brasil rural

Abstract

This thesis is composed of two empirical essays related to the economics of education. The first one, aims to analyze the effect of the per capita credit from the National Program for the Strengthening of Family Agriculture (PRONAF) on children's education and work, investigating whether there is evidence of the effects of income and/or substitution of individuals/families in those municipalities who received above-average credit in rural Brazil. To measure the effect of credit on choices made about child labor and schooling decisions, an ordered logit and the Propensity Score Matching (PSM). Data referring to the characteristics of individuals are from the 2010 Demographic Census from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), and information on Pronaf credit was obtained from the Central Bank of Brazil (BACEN). The cut was made with children aged 10 to 15 years who live in the rural area of Brazil. The results of the ordered logit show that higher family income increases the child's probability of working instead of working/studying, in addition to reducing the child's chances of only studying in relation to spending time studying/working. According to the PSM, it was observed that Pronaf has an adverse impact on child labor. The second essay aims to measure the effect of teachers' cultural capital on the Portuguese Language and Mathematics proficiencies of students in the 5th year of elementary school, based on data from Saeb 2017. Through the two-stage method, the cultural capital of teachers was instrumentalized by offering cultural activities from the Basic Municipal Information Survey (Munic) for the year 2014 (IBGE). It was shown that the teacher’s cultural capital impacts the performance of Portuguese Language and Mathematics students in rural and urban areas. In the quantile decomposition for both proficiencies and in both areas, the effect on learning is greater in the distribution of the lowest grades.