Despite the renewed interest in technical education, only a handful of studies analyze its effect on academic outcomes. In this paper we apply a regression discontinuity design to oversubscribed technical high school tracks in Pernambuco, Brazil, to identify the impact of technical education...

Concern over the high rate of contagion of COVID-19 has prompted world authorities to use the strategy of isolation and social confinement as the main non-pharmacological weapon against the disease that has rapidly killed millions of people worldwide. However, there is evidence that the...

This paper attempts to identify the climatic effect on birth outcomes in Brazil and, thus, to predict the potential impact of climate change. Panel data models indicate that excess and lack of rainfall have the most important harmful effects on newborns' health; temperature stresses and low...

Climate-sensitive health problems kill millions every year and undermine the physical and psychological well-being of millions more. To identify the climate impacts on dengue risk in Brazil, a comparative case study is used based on the synthetic controls approach. The South and Northeast...

Using data from the Brazilian Labor Monthly Survey (PME/ IBGE) for the years of 2006 and 2007, the paper investigates if the wage differential by firm size in Brazil can be explained by the predictions of the Efficiency Wage Theory. It is adopted a Switching Regression Model to estimate if large...

This paper studies the educational efficiency as determined only by the variables directly controlled by the school, isolated from the influence of other environmental characteristics, such as student's socioeconomic status, that might influence efficiency as well. An alternative application of...

Climate has relevant impacts on human health. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), climate-sensitive health problems kill millions of people every year and undermine the physical and psychological health of millions (WHO, 2012). In the particular case of vector-borne diseases,...

In this paper we address the issues involved with the use of microeconomic data, that is, household surveys, to compare the patterns of income growth among different regions instead of the commonly used aggregate data. In particular, we investigate the issues of aggregation of household income...