Três ensaios sobre a competição no mercado de ensino superior no Brasil

Abstract

Higher education plays an important role in the economic growth and development of a country, given its function as a generator of human capital. The complexities imposed on studies of the higher education good market, ranging from its definition as public or private goods to more specific aspects such as measuring the quality of the good, limit the amount of research on this market. This work seeks to contribute with three chapters that advance the discussion on the topic, which involves a market with great social importance, and which has undergone significant expansion in Brazil and the world, both on the supply and demand sides since the beginning of the 2000s, stimulated by changes in the economic environment in several countries and, in the case of Brazil, also by various government stimuli. Therefore, this work seeks to investigate the organization of the higher education industry in Brazil, what is the competitive nature of the private higher education market in Brazil and how it influences and is influenced by possible strategies used by companies in this sector. To this end, three chapters are presented based on Industrial Organization Theories with application in the higher education market in Brazil. Motivated by the expansion of the sector during the 2000s and 2010s, which could intensify competition, the first essay provides an assessment of the market power of HEIs through a stochastic frontier estimator, in which the efficiency study approach, typically used in stochastic frontier models, it is used to obtain a measure of market power. The second chapter aims to analyze the degree to which the “non-profit” organizational status of some HEIs changes the competitive conduct of companies in the educational market. To this end, the differences between the HEI groups will be proven based on the entry and exit behavior of companies, following the model proposed by Miller and Wilson (2018). This is therefore possible, as for-profit and non-profit companies undermine their cost structure and objective functions, these differences must be reflected in their exit decisions, in the same way as they would be for any other company decision. Finally, given the conclusion of a series of mergers and acquisitions of HEIs witnessed in Brazil since the beginning of the 2000s, the third essay aims to analyze the effects of such mergers between 2010 and 2019 on the higher education market, on the perceived quality of HEIs. . To this end, the method of ex-post analysis of differences in differences over several periods will be applied, in which changes in the quality of courses offered before and after the mergers will be highlighted, but considering trajectories that occurred if the operation had not been carried out. These trajectories are given by choosing a control group.