Corrupting Learning: Evidence from Missing Federal Education Funds in Brazil
By C. Ferraz, Frederico Finan, Diana B. Moreira. Social Science Research Network, 2012
194 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper examines if money matters in education by looking at whether missing resources due to corruption affect student outcomes. We use data from the auditing of Brazil's local governments to construct objective measures of corruption involving educational block grants transferred from the central government to municipalities. Using variation in the incidence of corruption across municipalities and controlling for student, school, and municipal characteristics, we find a significant negative association between corruption and the school performance of primary school students. Students residing in municipalities where corruption in education was detected score 0.35 standard deviations less on standardized tests, and have significantly higher dropout and failure rates. Using a rich dataset of school infrastructure and teacher and principal questionnaires, we also find that school inputs such as computer labs, teaching supplies, and teacher training are reduced in the presence of corruption. Overall, our findings suggest that in environments where basic schooling resources are lacking, money does matter for student achievement.
Subfields: Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4e972a6e02b14879e08f04d243cba3a8a0536b05
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Citations in the corpus
- Corruption Dynamics: The Golden Goose Effect (2013, unknown): “For example, Reinikka and Svensson (2004) find rates of 87% in a schooling program in Uganda, while Ferraz, Finan and Moreira (2012) find leakage of up to 55% in a schooling program in Brazil.”
- Corruption in Developing Countries (2012, unknown): “Ferraz, Finan, and Moreira (2010) provide direct evidence of the efficiency costs.”
- Tax me, but spend wisely? Sources of public finance and government accountability (2015, background): “Hirano et al. (2003) show that this estimator is efficient and Wooldridge (2007) that ignoring the first-stage estimation of the selection probabilities when performing inference yields conservative standard errors.”
- Corruption, investments and contributions to public goods: Experimental evidence from rural Liberia (2014, unknown): “Using clever identification strategies, economists have scrutinized the causal effect of factors such as community-based monitoring (Bjorkman and Svensson, 2009; Olken, 2007), electoral accountability (Ferraz and Finan, 2011), external audits (Ferraz et al., 2012; Olken, 2007), and the interaction b”