Two Essays on the economics of Education

We develop a job-market signaling model where signals may convey two pieces of information. This model is employed to study the GED exam and countersignaling (signals non-monotonic in ability). A result of the model is that countersignaling is more expected to occur in jobs that require a combination of skills that differs from the combination used in the schooling process. The model also produces testable implications consistent with evidence on the GED: (i) it signals both high cognitive and low non-cognitive skills and (ii) it does not affect wages. Additionally, it suggests modifications that would make the GED a more effective signal.

The costs of education, longevity and the poverty of nations

This paper explores the distortions on the cost of education, associated with government policies and institutional factors, as an additional determinant of cross-country income differences. Agents are finitely lived and the model takes into account life-cycle features of human capital accumulation. There are two sectors, one producing goods and the other providing educational services. The model is calibrated and simulated for 89 economies. We find that human capital taxation has a relevant impact on incomes, which is amplified by its indirect effect on returns to physical capital. Life expectancy plays an important role in determining long-run output: the expansion of the population working life increases the present value of the flow of wages, which induces further human capital investment and raises incomes. Although in our simulations the largest gains are observed when productivity is equated across countries, changes in longevity and in the incentives to educational investment are too relevant to ignore.

The impact of structured teaching methods on the quality of education

This paper estimates the impact of the use of structured methods on the quality of education of the students in primary public school in Brazil. Structure methods encompass a range of pedagogical and managerial instruments applied to the education system. In recent years, several municipalities in the State of São Paulo have contracted out private educational providers to implement these structured methods in their schooling system. Their pedagogical proposal involves structuring curriculum contents, elaboration and use of teachers and students textbooks, and training and supervision of the teachers and instructors. Using a difference in differences estimation strategy, we find that the fourth and eighth grader students in the municipalities with structured methods performed better in Portuguese and Math than students in municipalities not exposed to the methods. We find no differences in approval rates. However, a robustness check is not able to discard the possibility that unobserved municipal characteristics may affect the results.

Entry strategies into biosimilars: assessment of entry modes into the field of biosimilars from the perspective of pharmaceuticals, generics and biologics companies

Indústria farmacêutica de hoje está em transição. Como grandes blockbuster drogas estão perdendo ou estão prestes a perder a proteção de patente, e as grandes empresas farmacêuticas não estão substituindo os produtos com novas drogas químicas inovadoras, a indústria busca novas áreas de crescimento. Uma dessas áreas é o mercado de biossimilares, que está sendo inseridos por produtos farmacêuticos, genéricos e empresas de produtos biológicos. Mesmo que o grande potencial de mercado será acordado por volta de 2020, quando importantes blockbusters biológicos perder a proteção de patente, as empresas precisam decidir logo se querem participar ou não devido a elevadas barreiras à entrada técnicos, bem como de desenvolvimento de longo prazos. Como todas as empresas vêm de diferentes origens, compreendem capacidades diferentes e têm diferentes incentivos de entrada, a questão que surge é se esses fatos estão relacionados com as suas estratégias de entrada correspondentes. A tese utiliza estudos de caso de cada segmento da indústria farmacêutica - produtos farmacêuticos, biológicos e genéricos - e examina através de entrevistas semi-estruturadas, por isso que os participantes do estudo de caso entrevistados explicitamente escolhido sua estratégia de entrada. Os dados de entrevistas será então ligada a quadros estratégicos da revisão da literatura e irá ser utilizado para uma comparação global e análise. O estudo revelou que o fundo do participante do mercado que influenciam a sua estratégia de entrada. Os principais pontos de influência derivam tanto as barreiras à entrada, bem como os incentivos de entrada. A tese não é possível determinar o sucesso futuro do modo de entrada analisados no novo mercado.

Accountability and yardstick competition in the public provision of education

This paper explores the institutional change introduced by the public disclosure of an education development index (IDEB, Basic Education Development Index) in 2007 to identify the e ect of education accountability on yardstick competition in education spending for Brazilian municipalities. Our results are threefold. First, political incentives are pervasive in setting the education expenditures. The spatial strategic behavior on education spending is estimated lower for lame-ducks and for those incumbents with majority support at the city council. This suggests a strong relation between commitment and accountability which reinforces yardstick competition theory. Second, we nd a minor reduction (20%) in spatial interaction for public education spending after IDEB's disclosure | compared to the spatial correlation before the disclosure of the index. This suggests that public release of information may decrease the importance of the neighbors` counterpart information on voter`s decision. Third, exploring the discontinuity of IDEB`s disclosure rule around the cut-o of 30 students enrolled in the grade under assessment, our estimates suggest that the spatial autocorrelation | and hence yardstick competition | is reduced in 54%. Finally, an unforeseen result suggests that the disclosure of IDEB increases expenditures, more than 100% according to our estimates.

International civil society actors in Genetically Modificied Organisms as a field of struggle: a neo-gramscian study in Brazil and the United Kingdom

Since the international financial and food crisis that started in 2008, strong emphasis has been made on the importance of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) (or “transgenics”) under the claim that they could contribute to increase food productivity at a global level, as the world population is predicted to reach 9.1 billion in the year 2050 and food demand is predicted to increase by as much as 50% by 2030. GMOs are now at the forefront of the debates and struggles of different actors. Within civil society actors, it is possible to observe multiple, and sometime, conflicting roles. The role of international social movements and international NGOs in the GMO field of struggle is increasingly relevant. However, while many of these international civil society actors oppose this type of technological developments (alleging, for instance, environmental, health and even social harms), others have been reportedly cooperating with multinational corporations, retailers, and the biotechnology industry to promote GMOs. In this thesis research, I focus on analysing the role of “international civil society” in the GMO field of struggle by asking: “what are the organizing strategies of international civil society actors, such as NGOs and social movements, in GMO governance as a field of struggle?” To do so, I adopt a neo-Gramscian discourse approach based on the studies of Laclau and Mouffe. This theoretical approach affirms that in a particular hegemonic regime there are contingent alliances and forces that overpass the spheres of the state and the economy, while civil society actors can be seen as a “glue” to the way hegemony functions. Civil society is then the site where hegemony is consented, reproduced, sustained, channelled, but also where counter-hegemonic and emancipatory forces can emerge. Considering the importance of civil society actors in the construction of hegemony, I also discuss some important theories around them. The research combines, on the one hand, 36 in-depth interviews with a range of key civil society actors and scientists representing the GMO field of struggle in Brazil (19) and the UK (17), and, on the other hand, direct observations of two events: Rio+20 in Rio de Janeiro in 2012, and the first March Against Monsanto in London in 2013. A brief overview of the GMO field of struggle, from its beginning and especially focusing in the 1990s when the process of hegemonic formation became clearer, serves as the basis to map who are the main actors in this field, how resource mobilization works, how political opportunities (“historical contingencies”) are discovered and exploited, which are the main discourses (“science” and “sustainability” - articulated by “biodiversity preservation”, “food security” and “ecological agriculture”) articulated among the actors to construct a collective identity in order to attract new potential allies around “GMOs” (“nodal point”), and which are the institutions and international regulations within these processes that enable hegemony to emerge in meaningful and durable hegemonic links. This mapping indicates that that the main strategies applied by the international civil society actors are influenced by two central historical contingencies in the GMO field of struggle: 1) First Multi-stakeholder Historical Contingency; and 2) “Supposed” Hegemony Stability. These two types of historical contingency in the GMO field of struggle encompass deeper hegemonic articulations and, because of that, they induce international civil society actors to rethink the way they articulate and position themselves within the field. Therefore, depending on one of those moments, they will apply one specific strategy of discourse articulation, such as: introducing a new discourse in hegemony articulation to capture the attention of the public and of institutions; endorsing new plural demands; increasing collective visibility; facilitating material articulations; sharing a common enemy identity; or spreading new ideological elements among the actors in the field of struggle.