Abstract: Can access to health care mitigate the impacts from natural disasters in the developing world? This paper documents the health consequence of fires in the Brazilian Amazon and examines whether access to public healthcare services can mitigate potential adverse effects. I link comprehensive hospitalization records with satellite information on wildfire locations and wind patterns to identify the causal effect of wildfires on health outcomes for individuals across all age groups. Upwind fires increase hospital admissions for infants and children, which are driven by increases in respiratory hospitalizations for infants and children under 5 and in circulatory hospitalizations for children from 6 to 12 years old. These effects are substantially more negative for municipalities with limited access to public healthcare services, in particular those with few community health centers. The findings suggest an important role for health care delivery in mitigating the impacts of climate change.

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Abstract: Prenatal care and financial support for pregnant women are common social policies in high-income countries, but such programs are less frequent, and less frequently studied, in developing countries. This paper evaluates the impacts of a large cash transfer program in Brazil in which prenatal care was required for benefit receipt. Using individual-level administrative data from the program and from the Brazilian Ministry of Health, we compare women at different stages of pregnancy at the moment of program implementation to identify the degree to which additional income and access to prenatal care affected birth outcomes. We find that the benefit substantially reduced the incidence of low birth weight and preterm births. It also reduced the likelihood of starting prenatal care late during pregnancy. Better prenatal care in combination with the additional income from the program appears to drive improvements in birth outcomes.

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Abstract: Education-related changes are often argued as the main reasons for changes in earnings distribution. However, omitted variable and measurement error biases possibly affect econometric estimates of these effects. Brazil experienced a sharp fall of individual labour income inequality between 1996 and 2014. Coincidentally, in the Brazilian National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) there are special supplements on family background in these two years that allow us to better address the role played by falling education returns. This paper takes advantage of this information to provide new estimates of the level and evolution of the returns to education in Brazil using variable premiums by education level, quantile regressions, and pseudo panels. Regarding measurement error, the empirical strategy is to make use of the information of who responded to the PNAD questionnaire but controlling for availability biases. We find evidence of attenuation bias which reduces mean returns from education between 14 and 31.5 per cent. On the other hand, omitting parents’ education information also accounting for selectivity issues reduces the premium estimates by 24 per cent. Perhaps more importantly, the fall of education premium is heavily underestimated when we do not take family background into account. The highest fall of returns occurred in intermediary levels of education and income. Cohort effects also show that the reduction in the educational premium has been going on for several generations. Finally, we assess how parents’ education affects the educational outcomes of their children and how the intergenerational mobility of education has evolved over the last years. We find a reduction on the intergenerational persistence of education from 0.7 to 0.47 between 1996 and 2014. Cohort effects regarding intergenerational mobility also show that the fall in the persistence of education is also stronger for younger cohorts, which coincides with the fall of education premiums.

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