Research

Abstract: In this paper, I evaluate a rank-order tournament among public schools in Brazil. Yearly, top-performing schools within the eligible group receive a non-pecuniary recognition and a financial prize. Further, low-performing schools are designated to a support program, where they are allocated an extra budget and paired with an awardee to implement a cooperation program. I provide evidence of the effects of the policy in three dimensions. First, a differences-in-discontinuities design is implemented by exploring the tournament's introduction timing and eligibility criteria, revealing substantial improvements in students' test scores due to the tournament's introduction. Eligible schools locally outperformed non-competing schools by 0.23 and 0.34 standard deviations in Portuguese and Mathematics, respectively. Second, by exploring an exogenous cutoff that assigns the yearly prize to top-performing schools, I implement a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, and I do not find that winning the award has an effect on test scores three years later. Finally, by performing an analogous procedure, I find that the support program has a positive effect on the test scores of the low-performing schools assigned to it.

Selected Presentations:   IZA/ECONtribute Workshop on the Economics of Education (2023)  - 18th BiGSEM Doctoral Workshop on Economics and Management (2023) - 45th Meeting of the Brazilian Econometric Society (2023) - 28th Annual Meeting of the European Association of Young Economists (2024)