A note on non-cognitive skills and effectiveness of school quality in Brazil

Rafael Barbosa, Daniel Lopes Ribeiro and Alesandra Araújo Benevides

Revista Brasileira de Economia - RBE, 2026, vol. 80, issue 2

Abstract: This paper presents evidence that non-cognitive skills, acquired before high school, mediate the effect of public school quality in Brazil. We estimate school quality using a value-added model for secondary schools in the state of Ceará. Students with low engagement reduce their performance in better quality schools in math, suggesting a potential dynamic complementarity between school quality and prior non-cognitive skills. Our results also find that student expectations do not affect the effectiveness of school quality, indicating that not all non-cognitive skills exhibit such complementarity with school quality. We also find a heterogeneous effect according to students' socioeconomic status. Our results indicate that the effectiveness of public school quality in Brazil depends on students' non-cognitive skills.

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://periodicos.fgv.br/rbe/article/view/85680 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fgv:epgrbe:v:80:y:2026:i:2:a:85680

Access Statistics for this article

Revista Brasileira de Economia - RBE is currently edited by Ricardo Cavalcanti

More articles in Revista Brasileira de Economia - RBE from EPGE Brazilian School of Economics and Finance - FGV EPGE (Brazil) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Núcleo de Computação da FGV EPGE ().