Três ensaios sobre economia da educação e do trabalho: análises longitudinais sobre desempenho educacional e dinâmicas no mercado de trabalho

Abstract

Brazil is a country marked by high social, economic, and territorial heterogeneity. With continental dimensions, a population of more than 200 million inhabitants, and around 40 million children between 0 and 14 years old, understanding the mechanisms through which educational and labor inequalities are formed and reproduced is a central issue for public policy design. The literature on intergenerational mobility suggests that family characteristics, parental skills, the home environment, parental investments, and inherited human capital influence children’s future opportunities. This process may manifest itself both through the transmission of skills and through the reproduction of unequal socioeconomic contexts, reflected, for example, in the occupation of similar professional positions by parents and children. Based on this debate, this thesis is structured into three empirical essays that investigate complementary dimensions of educational and labor inequality in Brazil. The first article analyzes, using the Longitudinal Study of the 2005 School Generation (GERES), the association between parents’ occupation and children’s academic performance in the early years of primary education. Controlling for parental education, school type, family characteristics, and indicators of parental engagement in the school environment, the results indicate that children of parents in "white-collar" occupations tend to perform better in Mathematics and Portuguese when compared to students whose parents are not in this condition. The study also highlights the relevance of family participation in school as a factor associated with educational performance. The second article deepens the analysis of educational inequalities by investigating the relationship between home–school distance, school choice, urban mobility, and academic performance. Unlike the traditional approach, which treats distance as an exogenous variable reflecting access costs, the study argues that observed distance is endogenous to the school choice process. To address this issue, the analysis exploits the existence of municipal student transportation subsidy policies, known as student passes, as a source of institutional variation. The benefit reduces the financial constraint associated with commuting and may expand the set of feasible schools available to families. Using GERES data and Two-Stage Least Squares models, the results show that municipalities with the benefit have, on average, longer distances traveled between home and school. In the second stage, the portion of distance associated with the mobility policy is related to reductions in academic performance, suggesting that longer commutes impose relevant costs on learning. The third article shifts the focus to the labor market and investigates the persistent effects of exposure to hyperinflation on labor trajectories. Based on a cohort study of workers who entered the formal labor market in 1989 and in 1995, the article analyzes differences in the dynamics of earnings over the working life cycle. The study follows workers for 22 years, a period long enough to observe medium- and long-term trajectories in the formal labor market, including in relation to the minimum contribution window required for old-age retirement in Brazil. The analysis examines earnings heterogeneity, the risk of wage declines, earnings volatility, and continued participation in formal employment across the early, intermediate, and advanced stages of the career. The results indicate that different macroeconomic contexts at labor market entry are associated with distinct patterns of risk, permanence, and earnings dispersion. Taken together, the three essays contribute to the debate on social mobility, educational inequality, and labor market dynamics in Brazil. The thesis shows that inequalities are formed and reproduced through multiple channels, whether in the family environment, in the territorial conditions of access to school, or in labor trajectories over the life cycle. By bringing together the Economics of Education and Labor Economics, the study highlights how family, institutional, urban, and macroeconomic factors shape educational and labor opportunities in a deeply unequal country.