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This paper is the first to use program administrative data from Brazil's National Employment System (SINE) to assess the impact of SINE job interview referrals on labor market outcomes. We use data from a five-year period (2012-16) to evaluate the impact of SINE job referrals on reemployment, time until reemployment, job tenure, and wage rates. Causal impact estimates based on propensity score matching suggest that a SINE job interview referral increases the probability of finding a job within three months of the referral and reduces the number of months needed to find reemployment, the average job tenure of the next job, and the reemployment wage. Subgroup analysis suggests that SINE is particularly effective at helping less educated workers find work in a timely fashion. Finally, the evidence suggests that the self-service online labor exchange is less effective than the in-person job interview referrals provided at SINE offices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In several Latin American countries, conditional cash transfer programmes are a proven means of alleviating poverty in the short term and promoting education of children from disadvantaged families in the longer run. While the effectiveness of the Brazilian Bolsa Família for children's education outcomes up to 15 years of age has been widely documented, its contribution to the promotion of students of secondary school age has not been fully explored in light of the programme's expansion to 16-17 years olds in 2008. In this paper, I draw on Brazilian National Household Sample Survey data and use a difference-in-differences approach already applied in research in the context of Bolsa Família extension. Whereas these data were previously examined to detect intent-to-treat (ITT) effects due to insufficient information on treatment status, in this study I rely on a classifier method to additionally estimate average treatment effects on the treated who belong to families supposedly receiving Bolsa Família cash transfers. The results suggest that school attendance rates for 16-year-olds are particularly increased in the Brazilian Northeast, although the estimates are not significant when further time periods are taken into account. As comparably poor but non-recipient households have larger and consistently significant gains of school attendance, the effect on adolescent's education directly caused by the expansion of Bolsa Família remains ambiguous and thus cast doubt on the specific parallel trend assumption. In addition, no long-run ITT effects of the programme's expansion on school participation among 16 year old teenagers are found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the first to use program administrative data from Brazil's National Employment System (SINE) to assess the impact of SINE job interview referrals on labor market outcomes. We use data from a five-year period (2012--16) to evaluate the impact of SINE job referrals on reemployment, time until reemployment, job tenure, and wage rates. Causal impact estimates based on propensity score matching suggest that a SINE job interview referral increases the probability of finding a job within three months of the referral and reduces the number of months needed to find reemployment, the average job tenure of the next job, and the reemployment wage. Subgroup analysis suggests that SINE is particularly effective at helping less educated workers find work in a timely fashion. Finally, the evidence suggests that the self-service online labor exchange is less effective than the in-person job interview referrals provided at SINE offices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of affirmative action on the incentives to human capital accumulation are ambiguous from a theoretical perspective and the scarce empirical evidence on the matter provides mixed results. In this paper, we address this issue by investigating the impacts of Brazil's Law of Quotas on the students' performance in the college entrance exam, the ENEM. We provide causal evidence that the law fostered incentives to pre-college human capital accumulation, inducing students to attain higher ENEM scores. Moreover, the effects of the quotas were greater in quantitative-intensive subjects and these impacts increased throughout the first years after the law's implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the impact of a Brazilian reform that guaranteed for domestic workers the same labour rights that other employees already had access to. In 2013, the first change was to establish a limit to weekly working hours and the obligation to pay overtime. Two years later, other rights became enforceable after the implementation of a system that unified payroll taxes and social contributions to be collected by domestic workers' employers. We analyse the institutional reform through a difference-in-differences approach controlling for individual fixed effects. The analysis is carried out with microdata from the Continuous National Household Sample Survey from 2012 through 2016. Our results suggest that the policy induced a small reduction in working hours and had no effect on wages or formality. Impacts on the transition from domestic labour to unemployment after the reform are found, but they are not robust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The city of Fernandópolis, located in the countryside of the state of São Paulo, Brazil, imposed a juvenile curfew in 2005. This decision was not made at the municipal or state level, but in a courtroom. Subsequently, other municipalities in the state of São Paulo decided to adopt a juvenile curfew. To assess the effect of the curfew on reducing crime, this paper uses the difference‐in‐differences estimation to compare its impact, relative to municipalities that did not adopt a curfew. The results suggest that the curfew led to a decrease of 17.9% in thieves per thousand inhabitants in municipalities that adopted it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the effect of political participation on public spending at the local level in Brazil. In particular, we look at the phased-in implementation of electronic voting in the late 1990s—which enfranchised poorer voters by decreasing the number of invalid votes—to identify the causal effect of political participation on public spending. We build a theoretical political economy model which allows voters to cast, not purposefully, an invalid vote, and show that when poorer voters' likelihood of casting a valid vote increases, public social spending increases as well. We test this prediction empirically using a difference-in-differences model where municipalities using electronic voting constitute our treatment group. We find that an increase of 1 percentage point in the valid vote to turnout ratio for state representatives increases health spending by 1.8%; education by 1.4%; public employment by 1.25%; intergovernmental transfers by 1%; and local taxes by 2.6%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a means of dealing with shortcomings in the coverage, quality and efficiency of the public health care sector, several municipalities in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, have started to contract pre-certified non-profit or non-governmental organizations to take part in the delivery of health care services.This paper explores the impact of introducing these contracts in the primary health care sector. Using data on the 645 municipalities in the state of São Paulo and difference-in-differences methods, we estimate the effect of contracting out in the primary health care sector on various dimensions of mortality and health care use. The results show that implementation of the contracting out strategy significantly increases the number of primary health care appointments by approximately one appointment per user of the national health care system per year. Point estimates indicate a reducing effect on hospitalization for preventable diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]