Decomposing the Effects of CCTs on Entrepreneurship

This note assesses whether Bolsa-Família increases the probability of starting a venture in Brazil by decomposing its potential effects into three channels: wealth-constraint alleviation, insurance provision, and reduction of children’s labor supply (through the effect of the conditionality). Results are that entrepreneurship is indeed stimulated by Bolsa-Família in urban areas through the insurance and wealth-constraint alleviation effects, notwithstanding that new ventures are typically secondary sources of income. The conditionality seems not to impact the level of entrepreneurship. Hence, Bolsa-Família might have a positive long-term effect as well, instead of just offering short-term poverty relief.CCTs, conditional cash transfers, entrepreneurship, Bolsa-Familia, Brazil, wealth, insurance, children, labor, developing countries

Access to justice and entrepreneurship: evidence from Brazil’s Special Civil Tribunals

Entrepreneurship is usually indentified as an important determinant of aggregate productivity and long-term growth. The determinants of entrepreneurship, nevertheless, are not entirely understood. A recent literature has linked entrepreneurship to the development of the justice system. This paper contributes to this literature by evaluating the role of access to justice in determining the incidence of entrepreneurship. We explore the creation of Special Civil Tribunals in the Brazilian state of São Paulo during the 1990s. Special Civil Tribunals increased the geographic presence of the justice system, simplified judicial procedures, and increased the speed of adjudication of disputes. Using census data, and difference-in-differences and instrumental variable strategies, we find that implementation of Special Civil Tribunals led to increased entrepreneurship, defined as the probability that individuals are employers or selfemployed. Results are particularly strong and robust for the case of self-employment, and do not seem to be related to other changes in infrastructure or public good provision at the local level, or to pre-existing trends in entrepreneurship.access to justice, courts, entrepreneurship, institutions, Brazil Jel Codes: K1, K41, K42, H41, O12, O17, O54

Access to justice and entrepreneurship: Evidence from Brazil's special civil tribunals

Entrepreneurship is usually identified as an important determinant of aggregate productivity and long-term growth. The determinants of entrepreneurship, nevertheless, are not entirely understood. A recent literature has linked entrepreneurship to the development of the justice system. This paper contributes to this literature by evaluating the role of access to justice in determining the incidence of entrepreneurship. We explore the creation of Special Civil Tribunals in the Brazilian state of São Paulo during the 1990s. Special Civil Tribunals increased the geographic presence of the justice system, simplified judicial procedures, and increased the speed of adjudication of disputes. Using census data, and difference-in-differences and instrumental variable strategies, we find that implementation of Special Civil Tribunals led to increased entrepreneurship, defined as the probability that individuals are employers or self-employed. Results are particularly strong and robust for the case of self-employment, and do not seem to be related to other changes in infrastructure or public good provision at the local level, or to pre-existing trends in entrepreneurship

An education inequity index

One of the leading reasons behind social inequities is that elite groups have had access to more widespread and higher-quality educational opportunities much earlier, often when their economic returns were much higher. Nevertheless, measures of educational inequalities tend to focus exclusively on current differences within the school-age population. This paper proposes a new measure – the education inequity index (EII) – that captures cumulative differences in access to the economic returns of education across different groups. Concretely, the EII is the share of the cumulative wage premium appropriated by the elite over time in excess to that accrued by other groups. The paper advances a methodology to compute different versions of the EII using national household survey data. We then illustrate its applications by computing the economic, racial and gender EII for Brazil since 1980, separately for primary, secondary and college education. We showcase the new insights that the EII brings relative to other measures when it comes to monitoring inequities and informing policies to address them

Microfundamentos da Macroeconomia: notas críticas

A partir da década de 70 presencia-se o reaparecimento da microfundamentação na Economia, acompanhada de uma mudança de atitude do mainstream que passa a encarar a formalização e a microfundamentação como critérios de seleção entre conhecimento científico e não científico na Macroeconomia. Tal mudança tem levado a um gradual distanciamento entre a teoria e a prática que tem se mostrado nocivo para a Ciência Econômica. Este artigo procura criticar a microfundamentação da macro partindo de duas bases: primeiro, através da revisão do que convencionamos chamar de críticas internas à microfundamentação, relacionadas às distorções provenientes do reducionismo e da opção pelo agente representativo na elaboração de modelos econômicos; e, segundo, mediante críticas externas, focalizando a impossibilidade de se criar critérios a priori de seleção de teorias, devido à inexistência de fundamentos únicos e perenes para o conhecimento. Por fim, a perspectiva pragmática é apresentada como uma possível alternativa.Since the seventies, there has been a strong ressurgence of microfoundations in Economics, alongside with a change in mainstream's attitude towards theories that try to rate theories as scientific or non-scientific based on the degree of formalization and, specially, on the presence or lack of microfundations. This change has led to a gradual separation of theory and practice that seems to be harmful to economics. This paper criticizes microfoundations from two different standpoints: first, through reviewing what we call internal criticisms to microfoundations, mainly related to the misleading consequences of reductionism and of the adoption of representative agents in economic modeling; and, second, by developing external critics that highlight the impossibility of finding a priori criteria for judging theories, due to the inexistence of correct and definitive foundations of knowledge. Last, the pragmatic perspective is presented as an alternative

Are the effects of informational interventions driven by salience?

Informational interventions have been shown to significantly change behavior across a variety of settings. Is that because they lead subjects to merely update beliefs in the right direction? Or, alternatively, is it to a large extent because they increase the salience of the decision they target, affecting behavior even in the absence of inputs for belief updating? We study this question in the context of an informational intervention with school parents in Brazil. We randomly assign parents to either an information group, who receives text messages with weekly data on their child’s attendance and school effort, or a salience group, who receives messages that try to redirect their attention without child-specific information. We find that information makes parents more accurate about student attendance, and has large impacts on their test scores and grade promotion relative to the control group. Even though salience messages, in contrast, do not make parents more accurate about attendance levels, learning outcomes in the salience group improve by at least as much. Why? We show that treated parents across both conditions become more accurate about changes in their children’s grades over time, although not about grade levels. Such coarse belief updating is consistent with independent information acquisition in response to salience effects from both interventions. Our results have implications for the design and interpretation of informational interventions across a range of domains

The impacts of remote learning in secondary education during the pandemic in Brazil

The transition to remote learning in the context of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) might have led to dramatic setbacks in education. Taking advantage of the fact that São Paulo State featured in-person classes for most of the first school quarter of 2020 but not thereafter, we estimate the effects of remote learning in secondary education using a differences-in-differences strategy that contrasts variation in students’ outcomes across different school quarters, before and during the pandemic. We also estimate intention-to-treat effects of reopening schools in the pandemic through a triple-differences strategy, contrasting changes in educational outcomes across municipalities and grades that resumed in-person classes or not over the last school quarter in 2020. We find that, under remote learning, dropout risk increased by 365% while test scores decreased by 0.32 s.d., as if students had only learned 27.5% of the in-person equivalent. Partially resuming in-person classes increased test scores by 20% relative to the control group