The causal effect of family size on child labor and education

This paper investigates the causal relationship between family size and child labor and educationamong brazilian children. More especifically, it analyzes the impact of family size on child labor,school attendance, literacy and school progression. It explores the exogenous variation in familysize driven by the presence of twins in the family. The results are consistent under the reasonableassumption that the instrument is a random event. Using the nationally representative brazilianhousehold survey (Pnad), detrimental effects are found on child labor for boys. Moreover,significant effects are obtained for school progression for girls caused by the exogenous presenceof the young siblings in the household.

The Impact of the Economic Crisis on the Well-Being of Families in Brazil

This study examines the impact of the economic crisis occurred in Brazil in the years 1987 to 1991 on the well-being of families. The outcomes of interest are measures of education, health and poverty. Our main findings are that and economic crisis: i) reduces the probability that children of an age to begin school will actually do so, and increases that they will be delayed in school later on compared to other cohorts; ii) crisis increases the probability that a child will die before six months of age compared to other cohorts; and iii) increases the incidence of poverty in general for the overall population and has a strong negative impact among young children. Taken together, the results suggest that, given the absence of solid safety nets at that time, the economic crisis had deleterious effects on the well-being of families.economic crisis, Brazil, family well-being, education, health, and poverty

Is child labor harmful? The impact of working earlier in life on adult earnings

This paper explores the question: is working as a child harmful to an individual in terms of adult outcomes in earnings? Though an extremely important question, little is known about the effect of child labor on adult outcomes. Estimations of an instrumental variables earnings model on data from Brazil show that child labor has a large negative impact on adult earnings for male children even when controlling for schooling and that the negative impact of starting to work as a child reverses at around ages 12-14

Electoral impacts of uncovering public school quality: Evidence from Brazilian municipalities

School accountability systems that establish the adoption of incentives for teachers and school managers usually impact positively students' performance. However, in many circumstances, school accountability systems may face institutional restrictions to establish rewards and sanctions to administrators. In that aspect, the Brazilian accountability system is an interesting example: Most of primary public schools are run by municipal officials and federal government cannot enforce the adoption of incentives at local level. However, because mayors of Brazilian municipalities are the ultimate responsible for public elementary education we provide evidence that in 2008 local election, just some months after the publication of the second wave of a new evaluation of public schools run every two years by federal government, mayors became electorally accountable for not improving school quality. The results show that, on average, one point increase in a 0-10 scale index from 2005 to 2007 increased by around 5 percentage points the probability of re-election. This effect is even greater in localities with lower per capita income and those where the fraction of children at school age is larger. Therefore, electoral accountability may play a complementary role in school accountability systems that had not yet been fully exploited by education and political economics and political science literatures

FISCAL IMPACTS OF SOCIAL SECURITY REFORM IN BRAZIL

This article focuses on the reform of Social Security in Brazil, initiated in 2003. We estimate the fiscal impact of the original government proposal, as well as of the proposal approved at the House of Representatives, and the final format approved at the Senate. We also estimated both, the balancing contribution rate and the effective contribution rate, in the three phases of the reforming process. Results indicate that although the final impact was considerably reduced from the initial project, a great deal of progress has been made towards both, the reduction of annual Social Security deficit and its transformation into a more equitable system.

Decentralization And Education Performance: A First View To The Brazilian Process

This paper analyses the impact of the decentralization in educational system that is taking place in Brazil inthe last decade, as a result of several laws that encourage municipalities to invest in fundamental education.The proficiency tests undertaken by the government allows to follow some public schools in two points intime. Therefore we were able to create an experimental group with the schools that were under state system inthe SAEB exam and have migrated to the municipality system by the time of Prova Brasil and a control groupwith the schools that were under the state system between the two exams and compare the difference in theirresults using a fixed effect panel data analysis. The difference in difference estimator indicates that there is nosignificant change in the performance of the students.