Propaganda impressa de serviços educacionais: uma investigação sobre o impacto da fotografia das instalações e do testemunhal nas atitudes dos consumidores

In the actual competitive scenario the higher education institutions have been forced to become more active in recruiting students due to the reduction in candidates for its courses. Print advertising are important components in the educational services communications campaigns and, thus, they are an important focus of research. The literature on services communication suggests that the use of cues, as the installations picture and testimonial, presents an observable way to tangibilize educational services offers. We relate the cue paradigm theory as evaluative indicators of a product, with two of the four advertising strategies, with the objective to investigate the impact of the cues in the printed educational services ad¿s in relation to the consumers attitudes. More specifically, to investigate the impact of the physical representation strategy (installations picture - an intrinsic cue), and the association strategy (testimonial - an extrinsic cue), in the consumers attitudes toward the advertisement, the brand and the purchase intention. With this purpose an experiment between subjects with 123 students was carried through, with four levels of manipulation. In relation to consumer attitudes, none of the analyzed strategies presented a significative superiority in relation one with another. However, the subjects with low involvement in the value/auto-image dimension had presented more favorable attitudes in relation to the purchase intention in the presence of the advertising using a testimonial (association strategy - an extrinsic cue).

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.

Conhecimento e uso das métricas de marketing em instituições de ensino superior

A sociedade evoluiu, a oferta à educação superior aumentou e as instituições de ensino superior (IES) privadas passaram a investir em ações de marketing para se destacarem de seus concorrentes e tentarem obter maior quantidade de alunos matriculados. Esse fato foi responsável por provocar, nos últimos 10 anos, mudanças relevantes e adaptações nas gestões deste segmento, e a profissionalização da gestão de marketing nas IES no Brasil tem sido fonte de pesquisa nos estudos de métricas de marketing. O presente estudo tem como objetivo identificar na literatura métricas em marketing aplicadas aos serviços educacionais, o nível de conhecimento dos gestores de instituições de ensino sobre estas métricas e como estão sendo utilizadas e desenvolvidas. A metodologia utilizada neste estudo de natureza exploratória foi a pesquisa qualitativa por meio de entrevista em profundidade, realizada com oito profissionais dirigentes de marketing de IES privadas, classificadas em pequeno, médio e grande porte, da cidade de Curitiba - PR. Concluiu-se que o conhecimento empírico existe antes do avanço da educação, mas se fazem necessários o uso de métodos concretos e técnicos capazes de identificar os resultados das ações mercadológicas nas instituições. E verificou-se que essas ações começaram a ser praticadas nos últimos cinco anos pela maioria das instituições pesquisadas e a tendência é que exista maior desenvolvimento do mercado no setor da educação superior. Pesquisas futuras são discutidas à luz da teoria de marketing.

Three essays on local demand for public services

Local provision of public services has the positive effect of increasing the efficiency because each locality has its idiosyncrasies that determine a particular demand for public services. This dissertation addresses different aspects of the local demand for public goods and services and their relationship with political incentives. The text is divided in three essays. The first essay aims to test the existence of yardstick competition in education spending using panel data from Brazilian municipalities. The essay estimates two-regime spatial Durbin models with time and spatial fixed effects using maximum likelihood, where the regimes represent different electoral and educational accountability institutional settings. First, it is investigated whether the lame duck incumbents tend to engage in less strategic interaction as a result of the impossibility of reelection, which lowers the incentives for them to signal their type (good or bad) to the voters by mimicking their neighbors’ expenditures. Additionally, it is evaluated whether the lack of electorate support faced by the minority governments causes the incumbents to mimic the neighbors’ spending to a greater extent to increase their odds of reelection. Next, the essay estimates the effects of the institutional change introduced by the disclosure on April 2007 of the Basic Education Development Index (known as IDEB) and its goals on the strategic interaction at the municipality level. This institutional change potentially increased the incentives for incumbents to follow the national best practices in an attempt to signal their type to voters, thus reducing the importance of local information spillover. The same model is also tested using school inputs that are believed to improve students’ performance in place of education spending. The results show evidence for yardstick competition in education spending. Spatial auto-correlation is lower among the lame ducks and higher among the incumbents with minority support (a smaller vote margin). In addition, the institutional change introduced by the IDEB reduced the spatial interaction in education spending and input-setting, thus diminishing the importance of local information spillover. The second essay investigates the role played by the geographic distance between the poor and non-poor in the local demand for income redistribution. In particular, the study provides an empirical test of the geographically limited altruism model proposed in Pauly (1973), incorporating the possibility of participation costs associated with the provision of transfers (Van de Wale, 1998). First, the discussion is motivated by allowing for an “iceberg cost” of participation in the programs for the poor individuals in Pauly’s original model. Next, using data from the 2000 Brazilian Census and a panel of municipalities based on the National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) from 2001 to 2007, all the distance-related explanatory variables indicate that an increased proximity between poor and non-poor is associated with better targeting of the programs (demand for redistribution). For instance, a 1-hour increase in the time spent commuting by the poor reduces the targeting by 3.158 percentage points. This result is similar to that of Ashworth, Heyndels and Smolders (2002) but is definitely not due to the program leakages. To empirically disentangle participation costs and spatially restricted altruism effects, an additional test is conducted using unique panel data based on the 2004 and 2006 PNAD, which assess the number of benefits and the average benefit value received by beneficiaries. The estimates suggest that both cost and altruism play important roles in targeting determination in Brazil, and thus, in the determination of the demand for redistribution. Lastly, the results indicate that ‘size matters’; i.e., the budget for redistribution has a positive impact on targeting. The third essay aims to empirically test the validity of the median voter model for the Brazilian case. Information on municipalities are obtained from the Population Census and the Brazilian Supreme Electoral Court for the year 2000. First, the median voter demand for local public services is estimated. The bundles of services offered by reelection candidates are identified as the expenditures realized during incumbents’ first term in office. The assumption of perfect information of candidates concerning the median demand is relaxed and a weaker hypothesis, of rational expectation, is imposed. Thus, incumbents make mistakes about the median demand that are referred to as misperception errors. Thus, at a given point in time, incumbents can provide a bundle (given by the amount of expenditures per capita) that differs from median voter’s demand for public services by a multiplicative error term, which is included in the residuals of the demand equation. Next, it is estimated the impact of the module of this misperception error on the electoral performance of incumbents using a selection models. The result suggests that the median voter model is valid for the case of Brazilian municipalities.