EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Education Quality and Returns to Schooling: Evidence from Migrants in Brazil

Luiz Brotherhood, Pedro Ferreira and Cezar Santos

Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2019, vol. 67, issue 3, 439 - 459

Abstract: We provide a new education quality index for states within a developing country using 2010 Brazilian data. This measure is constructed based on the notion that the financial returns obtained from an additional year of schooling can be seen as being derived from the value that market forces assign to this education. We use migrant data to estimate returns to schooling of individuals who studied in different states but work in the same labor market. We find very heterogeneous educational qualities. In fact, Brazil displays cross-state educational quality variation almost as great as that observed across countries. We compare our index with standardized test scores, educational outcome variables, and public expenditure per schooling stage at the state level, producing new evidence related to education in a large developing country. We conduct an education quality–adjusted development accounting exercise for Brazilian states and find that human capital accounts for 26%–31% of output per worker differences. Adjusting for quality increases human capital’s explanatory power by 60%.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/698314 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/698314 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
Working Paper: Education quality and returns to schooling: evidence from migrants in Brazil (2017) Downloads
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:ucp:ecdecc:doi:10.1086/698314

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Development and Cultural Change from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-24
Handle: RePEc:ucp:ecdecc:doi:10.1086/698314