Essays on management and education

Resumo

This thesis contains three independent papers. Below follows a brief description of each article. The first paper is co-authored with Andrea Flores, Gustavo Oliveira and Marcos Salgado. This paper examines democratic elections as an alternative to political appointments for selecting school principals in Brazil, where 13.7 million public school students attend schools with elected principals. Using panel data from 2007–2017, we exploit within-school variation from schools that switch selection methods over time. Schools transitioning from political appointments to elections improve their management practices by 0.12 standard deviations, while schools moving in the opposite direction experience a symmetric deterioration of 0.14 standard deviations. We provide evidence that both selection and incentive channels contribute to these effects. In addition, elections improve staff morale. These findings suggest that electing principals can enhance organizational performance by reducing political patronage while incorporating stakeholder knowledge about candidate quality. The second paper is co-authored with Francisco Costa and Diana Goldemberg. This study investigates the potential of peer mentoring programs to enhance organizational efficiency and outcomes by pairing high-performing managers with underperforming peers. Using a state-level peer mentoring program for school principals in Ceará, Brazil, we employ a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to identify causal effects. Our findings show that the peer mentoring program increased the performance of mentored principals, reflected in a 0.247 standard deviation increase in literacy achievement among 2nd-grade students, without harming the performance of mentor principals. These gains are reflected not only in average performance but also in the reduction of literacy disparities among students within schools. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that effects are stronger when mentors and mentees are geographically close or when mentors are of higher quality. These findings suggest that peer mentoring is an effective and scalable alternative to leadership turnover for improving the performance of low-performing managers. The third paper, published in the Brazilian Review of Econometrics, is co-authored with Katia Aiko Nishiyama Alves and Valdemar Pinho Neto. This study examines the return on education for wages in Brazil at the regional level during the period following the coronavirus pandemic. We applied the two-stage methodology developed by Heckman (1979) to quarterly data from the PNADC from 2018 to 2023. The results reveal that although educational returns in Brazil remain high, there is evidence of a structural change in the country after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, resulting in a noticeable reduction in the return on education for wage levels. A regional analysis showed that the North and Northeast regions experienced an even sharper decline in educational returns.

Ficha do documento

Tipo

Tese

Ano

2026

Instituição

Fundação Getulio Vargas

Fonte

Repositório da FGV

Idioma

Inglês

Acesso

Acesso aberto

Identificador

oai:repositorio.fgv.br:10438/39896

Temas

EconomiaGestão PúblicaDesenvolvimento RegionalEducação

Palavras-chave

School principal selectionPublic sectorPeer mentoringManagement practicesPrincipal effectivenessEducational inequalityEconomiaDiretores escolaresAvaliação educacionalSetor públicoEnsino entre paresGestão do conhecimento