Três ensaios em economia social

• Autor(a) principal: Santana, Fernanda Leite
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UFPB
• Texto Completo: https://repositorio.ufpb.br/jspui/handle/123456789/11725
• topic: Economia Social; Regressão Quantílica com efeitos fixos; Tamanho da Turma; Precipitação; Desempenho Acadêmico; Mortalidade Infantil; Social Economics; Quantile regression with fixed effects; Size of the Group; Precipitation; Academic performance; Child mortality; CNPQ::CIENCIAS SOCIAIS APLICADAS::ECONOMIA

This work consists of three articles in the area of social economics, which are dedicated to study three empirical identifications under the scope of estimators with individual controls for individual effects. For this purpose, are constructed quantile panels for each empirical design as the existing literature and theoretical framework. In the first trial we investigate the effects of class size on academic performance of students who entered the UFPB from 2001 to 2010. For conditional estimates of the median, the results suggest a negative relationship between class size and academic performance, leading to the conclusion that class reduction policies would have a beneficial effect on the academic performance of UFPB students. However, when using the estimator QR (FE), we find out a overestimated value of this effect resulting from the standard estimator bias, because it does not capture the unobserved heterogeneity. Furthermore, analysis along the conditional distribution performance demonstrates that there is heterogeneity effects. The results highlighted here bring new elements to public policy and also open a relevant research agenda because of the lack of consensus in the literature of the effect of the variable of interest. In turn, the second trial brings to light questions about the determinants of academic performance of students analyzing the causal relationship between the rain water availability during pregnancy of individuals born in the Brazilian semi-arid and individual educational outcome. The assumption is that the rains in year of birth has a positive relationship with the development of cognitive and non-cognitive skills of individuals as adults. In this scenario, similar to the previous analysis, the conditional median estimator overestimate the effect of the variable of interest, which is the log deviation of rain 12 months before the birth of the individual. In general, the effect is positive, as well as persists along the conditional distribution of academic achievement. Such findings are relevant for public policies as evidence that investment in early childhood has a greater effect than investments done later, which raises questions about the role of access policies to higher education, as the quota system, among others. Finally, the third test contributes to public policies to emphasize the importance of climate issues in health outcomes. To assess the effects of rain, we make three empirical exercises: i) quantile regression estimator with fixed effects ii) quantile regression estimator with fixed effects and instrumental variables; iii) observational precipitation data. The results suggest that: i) the higher the rainfall before conception, during pregnancy and the first years of life of individuals, the lowest infant mortality rate in the region; ii) when controlling the unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity in the relationship, the rainfall has less weight indicating that methods conditional to mean overestimate this relationship. In summary, the results corroborate the literature that babies born in arid and go through periods of drought when in the womb of their mothers face greater risk of death, especially when drought undertake the periods before and after conception of individuals .