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cv-vivian-amorim

dime-standards

Repository with resources for DIME's research standards and coding standards

h1n1-school-closures-sp-2009

phd_thesis

My PhD thesis has three essays on public primary education in Brazil. The first chapter of this thesis investigates the impacts of the school closures adopted in São Paulo/Brazil amid the 2009 H1N1 outbreak. I find evidence that a three-week shutdown led to a reduction in test scores equivalent to six weeks of schooling and was more pronounced among vulnerable students. The results indicate that a long period of school shutdowns, such as the one experienced during the Covid-19 outbreak, might lead to the loss of all the learning accumulated between 2007 and 2019 by an average fifth-grader. The second chapter explores the impacts of \textit{Acelera}, an intervention that has been implemented in Recife/Brazil since 2010, and focus on primary education students lagging behind their peers and who are at least one year older than the adequate age for their grade. The program aims to adequate school curricula with students' level of learning in order to increase their performance, and grade promotion, and decrease dropout and age-grade distortion. I find evidence that the program increased the proficiency in Portuguese and math by 0.05 of a standard deviation and grade promotion by 15 percentage points (0.30 of a standard deviation). The heterogeneity analysis indicates that students with fewer years of age-grade distortion tend to benefit more from the intervention. The third chapter assesses the inefficiency of public primary education expenditures of the Brazilian municipalities. I estimate that local authorities efficiently use between 68\% to 81\% of their resources. This means that if they were able to emulate the best practices adopted by the municipalities in the efficient frontier, there would be a fiscal space of at least 87 billion BRL (18 billion USD), which is more than twice the 2022 \textit{Bolsa Família} budget, the most import conditional cash transfer in the country. An amount that could be allocated in interventions to increase students' performance in a post-pandemic context where they are so much needed.

seliga-acelera-recife