Ensaios sobre políticas econômicas: educação e trabalho

Abstract

This thesis comprises two essays that evaluate two significant Brazilian public policies. The first essay assesses the pioneering experience of constructing and managing schools through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in Brazil. It focuses on the elementary schools in the city of Belo Horizonte (BH) built and managed under the PPP model, aiming to evaluate the performance of students from these schools and compare it to the performance of students from traditional municipal elementary schools. The proxy used to assess performance was the scores in Portuguese language and mathematics from the SAEB exam in the years 2017 and 2019. The empirical strategy employed was Propensity Score Matching (PSM). The findings non indicate the existence of an effect in performance in mathematics and Portuguese. The second essay addresses the evaluation of the impact of the Brazilian Labor Reform of 2017, which significantly altered the country's labor legislation, aiming to make work relations more flexible and stimulate job creation. The study employed the Bayesian Structural Time Series (BSTS) methodology to assess the reform's effect on job creation, considering data up to the end of 2019 and excluding the Covid-19 pandemic period to avoid biases. The results indicate that the reform had heterogeneous effects, with significant variations across different regions and economic sectors. Generally, there was an increase in job generation, although the effects are more pronounced in some regions and sectors. The study also reveals that, despite the positive effects on job creation, there are challenges in directly attributing the reform to changes in the labor market due to the complexity of economic factors involved.