Resumo do evento

Biography

Beatriz Azevedo is a first-year Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the University of Minho. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics (2021) and a master’s degree in Economics (2023), both from the University of Minho. Her master’s dissertation, titled “The effects of decentralisation on educational outcomes: The Portuguese municipalities’ case”, was supervised by Professor Linda Veiga and co-supervised by Professor João Cerejeira. Before, she benefited from an FCT Research Initiation Grant to participate in a study about decentralisation at NIPE, took an internship at the Microdata Research Laboratory of Banco de Portugal (BPLIM) and collaborated as a Research Assistant at the Copenhagen Business School (CBS). Her main research interests centre on Political Economy and Public Choice areas, focusing on the dynamics of Portuguese local governments.

Abstract

Over the past few decades, Portugal has undergone a gradual decentralisation of central government functions, namely on education. The main goal of this paper is to assess the impacts of decentralisation on the educational outcomes within Portuguese municipalities, focusing on the execution contracts signed in 2009 and 2015. This research relies on a newly built database, encompassing information for all 278 mainland municipalities from 2004 to 2019. The empirical results from a difference-in-differences approach suggest that the new responsibilities had little impact on educational accessibility and quality, with no significant fluctuations over the years. Nonetheless, when we apply the multiple time periods framework to the first reform, it appears that decentralisation may have improved retention and schooling rates at the basic education level.

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