Submitted by Ricardo Elias Mauad de Andrade (proezas@gmail.com) on 2017-06-06T17:16:56Z No. of bitstreams: 1 DissertaçãoRicardoEliasBiblioteca.pdf: 606350 bytes, checksum: a862ab78155cc25930f033f460a6fbdd (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by GILSON ROCHA MIRANDA (gilson.miranda@fgv.br) on 2017-06-08T12:47:00Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 DissertaçãoRicardoEliasBiblioteca.pdf: 606350 bytes, checksum: a862ab78155cc25930f033f460a6fbdd (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-06-21T14:45:05Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 DissertaçãoRicardoEliasBiblioteca.pdf: 606350 bytes, checksum: a862ab78155cc25930f033f460a6fbdd (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-03-31 / The present work inspects the literature on peer effects and bring the main identification issues on the phenomenon. In particular, it analyzes papers that study the gender composition and the behavior answers for situations in which the composition is changed, mainly in educational environment, addressing works that make a distinction between mix and exclusive gender groups. It discusses the results of these papers, showing that a higher female share in peer groups has positive impacts - meaning higher grades and a more welcoming class environment sensed by students - although it cannot be said whether this effects are endogenous or exogenous. / O presente trabalho revisa a literatura de peer effects e elucidar as principais dificuldades de se identificar o fenômeno. Em particular, avalia os artigos que analisam a composição de gênero e a resposta comportamental para situações em que a composição de gênero muda, principalmente no ambiente educacional, visando trabalhos que façam distinção entre turmas mistas e exclusivas de cada gênero. Discute-se ao final os resultados dos artigos debatidos, que demonstram um grande fator positivo do aumento do percentual de mulheres nos grupos de pares - no sentido de maiores notas e maior percepção de bem-estar do aluno com relação ao ambiente - apesar de não se poder distinguir se os efeitos são endógenos ou exógenos.

Submitted by Bruno Campos (brunogcampos@gmail.com) on 2017-09-27T00:08:08Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Peer_effects_and_teacher_absences.pdf: 389435 bytes, checksum: 8bd7907f92454e027a7a13f5ff6aa9a2 (MD5) / Rejected by Thais Oliveira (thais.oliveira@fgv.br), reason: Prezado Bruno, boa tarde! Para que possamos aprovar seu trabalho, é necessário que centralize a palavra "Summary". Qualquer dúvida entre em contato no mestradoprofissional@fgv.br ou ligue 3799-7764 Att, Thais Oliveira on 2017-09-27T19:46:06Z (GMT) / Submitted by Bruno Campos (brunogcampos@gmail.com) on 2017-09-27T21:04:41Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Peer_effects_and_teacher_absences.pdf: 388200 bytes, checksum: b9bc1c4b2d9ba7e165b0f675339eab9c (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Thais Oliveira (thais.oliveira@fgv.br) on 2017-09-27T21:36:30Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Peer_effects_and_teacher_absences.pdf: 388200 bytes, checksum: b9bc1c4b2d9ba7e165b0f675339eab9c (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-09-28T16:43:42Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Peer_effects_and_teacher_absences.pdf: 388200 bytes, checksum: b9bc1c4b2d9ba7e165b0f675339eab9c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-08-29 / Teacher quality is of critical importance in student achievement. In addition to previous training, experience and teaching methodologies, teacher assiduity plays a pivotal role in pupils' development. In this paper, we investigate how teacher absences are influenced by their colleagues at work. More specifically, we try to answer if there are peer effects behind teachers’ behavior. We resort to a model of instrumental variables to isolate the causal impact from potential identification problems arising from endogenous group formation and estimate a positive, significant peer effect of teacher absences on those of their colleagues. Additionally, we explore how teachers under different contract regimes are affected, and show peer effects are not linear – what suggests the existence of an optimal allocation of teachers that minimizes collective absences. Furthermore, we show teachers exert discretion on absences, and that this kind of absences are what mainly drives our results. / A qualidade dos professores é de importância crítica para o desenvolvimento dos alunos. Além de treinamento prévio, experiência e metodologia pedagógica, a assiduidade dos professores exerce papel fundamental na aprendizagem. Neste trabalho, investigamos como o absenteísmo de professores é influenciado pelos seus colegas de trabalho. Mais especificamente, tentamos responder se há efeitos dos pares por trás do comportamento dos docentes. Recorremos a modelos de variáveis instrumentais para isolar o impacto causal de potenciais problemas de identificação, oriundos de formação endógena do quadro docente, e estimamos um impacto positivo e significante da conduta dos colegas sob os professores focais. Adicionalmente, exploramos como professores sob diferentes regimes contratuais são afetados, e mostramos que os efeitos não são lineares – o que sugere a existência de uma alocação ótima de professores com vistas a minimizar o número de faltas. Além disso, mostramos que os professores exercem algum grau de discricionariedade ao faltar, e que é desse comportamento que derivam nossos resultados.

My thesis contains essays on voting theory, market structures and fiscal federalism: (i) One Person, Many Votes: Divided Majority and Information Aggregation, (ii) Runoff Elections and the Condorcet Loser, (iii) On the Influence of Rankings when Product Quality Depends on Buyer Characteristics, and (iv) Redistributing Income under Fiscal Vertical Imbalance.<p><p>(i) One Person, Many Votes: Divided Majority and Information Aggregation (joint with Micael Castanheira)<p>In elections, majority divisions pave the way to focal manipulations and coordination failures, which can lead to the victory of the wrong candidate. This paper shows how this flaw can be addressed if voter preferences over candidates are sensitive to information. We consider two potential sources of divisions: majority voters may have similar preferences but opposite information about the candidates, or opposite preferences. We show that when information is the source of majority divisions, Approval Voting features a unique equilibrium with full information and coordination equivalence. That is, it produces the same outcome as if both information and coordination problems could be resolved. Other electoral systems, such as Plurality and Two-Round elections, do not satisfy this equivalence. The second source of division is opposite preferences. Whenever the fraction of voters with such preferences is not too large, Approval Voting still satisfies full information and coordination equivalence.<p><p>(ii) Runoff Elections and the Condorcet Loser<p>A crucial component of Runoff electoral systems is the threshold fraction of votes above which a candidate wins outright in the first round. I analyze the influence of this threshold on the voting equilibria in three-candidate Runoff elections. I demonstrate the existence of an Ortega Effect which may unduly favor dominated candidates and thus lead to the election of the Condorcet Loser in equilibrium. The reason is that, contrarily to commonly held beliefs, lowering the threshold for first-round victory may actually induce voters to express their preferences excessively. I also extend Duverger's Law to Runoff elections with any threshold below, equal or above 50%. Therefore, Runoff elections are plagued with inferior equilibria that induce either too high or too low expression of preferences.<p><p>(iii) On the Influence of Rankings when Product Quality Depends on Buyer Characteristics<p>Information on product quality is crucial for buyers to make sound choices. For "experience products", this information is not available at the time of the purchase: it is only acquired through consumption. For much experience products, there exist institutions that provide buyers with information about quality. It is commonly believed that such institutions help consumers to make better choices and are thus welfare improving.<p>The quality of various experience products depends on the characteristics of buyers. For instance, conversely to the quality of cars, business school quality depends on buyers (i.e. students) characteristics. Indeed, one of the main inputs of a business school is enrolled students. The choice of buyers for such products has then some features of a coordination problem: ceteris paribus, a buyer prefers to buy a product consumed by buyers with "good" characteristics. This coordination dimension leads to inefficiencies when buyers coordinate on products of lower "intrinsic" quality. When the quality of products depends on buyer characteristics, information about product quality can reinforce such a coordination problem. Indeed, even though information of high quality need not mean high intrinsic quality, rational buyers pay attention to this information because they prefer high quality products, no matter the reason of the high quality. Information about product quality may then induce buyers to coordinate on products of low intrinsic quality.<p>In this paper, I show that, for experience products which quality depends on the characteristics of buyers, more information is not necessarily better. More precisely, I prove that more information about product quality may lead to a Pareto deterioration, i.e. all buyers may be worse off due.<p><p>(iv) Redistributing Income under Fiscal Vertical Imbalance (joint with Marjorie Gassner and Vincenzo Verardi)<p>From the literature on decentralization, it appears that the fiscal vertical imbalance (i.e. the dependence of subnational governments on national government revenues to support their expenditures) is somehow inherent to multi-level governments. Using a stylized model we show that this leads to a reduction of the extent of redistributive fiscal policies if the maximal size of government has been reached. To test for this empirically, we use some high quality data from the LIS dataset on individual incomes. The results are highly significant and point in the direction of our theoretical predictions.<p> / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

La «petite corruption» est un élément important de la relation entre personnels de santé et patients dans les contextes propices aux actes de corruption. Ce phénomène bien étudié en Europe centrale et orientale sous le nom de «paiements informels» (PIs), est peu documenté en Afrique. Pour contribuer à combler cette lacune, cette thèse propose une série d'analyses sur certains aspects clés de ce problème dans le contexte africain. Dans le chapitre 1, nous montrons que les PIs sont concentrés sur les plus pauvres. Ils sont plus susceptibles d’avoir fait face à l'absence de médicaments, à l'absentéisme des médecins et à des longs temps d'attente dans leur hôpital public local, ce qui accroît la probabilité d'encourir des frais non officiels. Une analyse plus approfondie de l'influence des facteurs d'offre dans le chapitre 2 confirme que les longs temps d'attente, la gestion du personnel de santé (par exemple, le recours à la délégation de tâches) et la perception des personnels vis-à-vis de leur revenu jouent un rôle crucial. Le chapitre 3 met en évidence l’existence d’effets de pairs dans la survenue des PIs lors de la consultation, l’effet étant plus important chez les plus pauvres. Enfin, avec un modèle théorique dans le chapitre 4, nous montrons qu’à l'équilibre, les PIs sont plus élevés en salariat pur qu’avec une rémunération basée sur la production. Aussi, une augmentation du paiement unitaire dans ce dernier système fait baisser les PIs, alors qu'une augmentation du salaire a un effet contraire. Un système mixte (salaire + rémunération à la production) semble être approprié pour assurer la participation des médecins et les inciter à réduire la recherche de rente. / « Petty corruption » is an important feature of the relationship between health workers and patients in settings that allow corrupt acts to happen. It has been well studied in Central and Eastern Europe under the term « informal payments » (IPs), but little has been done in Africa. To contribute in filling this gap in the literature, this thesis proposes a series of analyses to better understand some key aspects of this issue in the African context. In chapter 1, we show that the occurrence of IPs is concentrated on the poorest individuals. They are more likely to report having faced the lack of medicines, absenteeism of doctors and long waiting times in their local hospital, and these factors significantly increase the probability of incurring unofficial fees. In chapter 2, a deeper analysis of the influence of supply factors confirms that long waiting times, the management of the health workforce (e.g. using task shifting) and health workers’ perception vis-à-vis their earnings play a crucial role. In chapter 3, we highlight the existence of peer effects in the occurrence of IPs during consultation for HIV care, with a higher effect for the poorest patients. Finally, with a theoretical model in chapter 4, we show that at the equilibrium, the level of IPs is higher when the physician is paid by salary compared to output-based remuneration. Also, an increase of the unit payment in the later system leads to a reduction of IPs, while an increase of salary has the contrary effect. A blended remuneration (mix of salary and output-based remuneration) appears to be appropriate to both ensure the participation of physicians and introduce incentives to reduce rent-seeking.

Le présent travail de thèse aborde la problématique des effets de pairs en contexte scolaire. A partir de l’analyse détaillée d’une large base des données issue d’une enquête nationale au Chili (SIMCE 2004), on s’interroge sur les mécanismes qui véhiculent les influences entre élèves différemment dotés d’un point de vue de leurs capitaux culturels, humains et scolaires. Ces influences sembleraient présentes sur différents résultats à l’école, y compris ceux de type académique. Considérant la littérature produite sous différentes approches disciplinaires —sociologie, économie, psychologie sociale et sciences de l’éducation — on s’attarde sur les manières d’identifier et de mesurer lesdits effets de pairs. En même temps, on considère la présence de dimensions subjectives capables d’exprimer, en partie, le vécu scolaire des élèves. Ces dimensions seraient, par ailleurs, reliées à la présence des pairs et aux interactions entre élèves. De manière additionnelle, on propose une révision de la littérature sur le système scolaire au Chili, notamment sur sa segmentation socio-scolaire et sa relation avec le mécanisme de vouchers. Dans ce cadre, trois interrogations principales organisent ce travail. D’une part, l’existence ou non d’un impact net sur les acquis scolaires des pratiques d’étude faisant appel aux camarades. Ensuite, la présence probable des influences sous la forme des « transferts des capitaux » entre élèves différemment dotés et déclarant pratiquer l’entraide. Enfin, les relations qui s’avèrent visibles entre ces pratiques et des dimensions telles que le bien-être à l’école ou le concept du soi académique, mais aussi, entre ces dernières et les acquis scolaires. Une séquence d’analyses est entreprise visant à donner des bases robustes aux éventuelles réponses à ces questions. Entre autres, différentes séries d’analyses de régression hiérarchique et par quantiles ont été conduites sur quatre disciplines scolaires. Les principaux résultats de recherche indiquent, d’un côté, que les interactions entre élèves sont assez répandues en milieux scolaire (entre 22% et 41% en moyenne), mais leur proportion varie d’une discipline à l’autre et selon la direction qui prend l’aide. Plus encore, ces interactions sont significativement liées aux résultats scolaires. A conditions comparables, les élèves académiquement faibles gagnent à être aidés par leurs camarades, quelque soit la discipline concernée. En même temps, les élèves qui aident leurs camarades montrent toujours un profil académique fortement associé à des gains de score assez importants. D’un autre côté, on trouve que les élèves possédant plus de capital culturel ont, toutes choses égales par ailleurs, de plus fortes chances de déclarer aider leurs camarades. Enfin, les analyses confirment que les interactions entre élèves sont, de manière importante et significative, liées aux sentiments de bien-être à l’école et au concept de soi académique. La construction d’indices pertinents pour ces derniers est, d’ailleurs, discutée. Différents résultats secondaires ont été aussi produits et discutés, notamment la confirmation, pour la première fois dans le cas chilien, des hypothèses associées au paradigme BFLPE (Marsh, 1987). Ces résultats sont discutés dans leurs probables conséquences en termes de politique éducative, notamment dans le cadre des systèmes éducatifs à forte ségrégation sociale et scolaire. / This Thesis addresses the issue of peer-effects in the context of school. From analysis of a large database produced by a Chilean national study (SIMCE 2004), this work investigates the mechanisms through which pupils with different levels of scholastic, human and cultural capital influence each other. These influences seem present for a diverse range of school outcomes, including academic achievement. Drawing on the literature produced by different disciplinary approaches —sociology, economics, social psychology and education— the study focuses on ways of identifying and measuring peer-effects. The presence of subjective dimensions capable of reflecting, in part, the school experience of pupils is also taken into consideration. Beside, those dimensions are connected both with peers presence and peer interactions. In addition, the thesis re-examines the existing literature on the Chilean school system, including its social and academic segregation and its relationship with the voucher system. Within this framework, three main points of interrogation organize this work. First, whether study practices which involve peer assistance have a clear impact on standardized school test scores. Second, the likely presence of influences, —in the form of “capitals transfers”— between pupils with different backgrounds who practice peer assistance. Finally, the visible relationships between peer assistance and feelings of well-being at school or academic self-concept, but also, between the latter and school achievement. A sequence of analysis was undertaken out to provide robust foundations for possible answers to those questions. Among other things, different sets of hierarchical and quantile regression analysis were conducted in four school subjects. The main research findings show, on the one hand, that peer assistance between pupils is fairly widespread in the school context (between 22% and 41% in average) but its prevalence varies according to the subjects and the directionality of the assistance. Further, those peer assistance is significantly related at school achievement. In all subjects and at similar conditions, poor achievers benefit from help by their classmates. At the same time, those that help their classmates always showed a strong academic profile related to the higher and greater gains in test scores. In the other hand, we find that pupils with more cultural capital, all other things held constant, are more likely to report help other pupils. Finally, this research confirms that the relationship peer assistance and feelings of school well-being and academic self-concept is large and significant. Several secondary findings were also produced and discussed, including confirmation, for the first time in Chilean case, of the hypothesis associated with the paradigm BFLPE (Marsh, 1987). Those results are discussed with regard for their probable consequences in terms of educational policy, particularly in systems with high academic and social segregation.