The Impact of School Infrastructure and Teachers' Human Capital on Academic Performance in Brazil.

To improve one of the lowest rates of literacy and numeracy in the world, the government of Brazil has targeted public education reform, given the strong link between an educated population and economic growth. This study examines the academic performance of the Brazilian public primary school system. It addresses the empirical shortcomings of prior research to examine the dynamics of the relationship between academic performance scores and several demographic and institutional variables, such as socioeconomic characteristics, variations in school infrastructure and school complexity, and teachers' human capital. We employed quantile regression to explore the determinants of academic performance across 35,490 schools in rural and urban environments in Brazil. The dependent variable in our analysis captures the academic performance score, as measured by Brazil's education authorities, of each school in our dataset. The model includes several education-related indices used in prior research and, as explanatory factors, measures of teachers' human capital and the students' socioeconomic level, which synthesizes information on parents' education and household income. The results suggest that several institutional variables, including access to school libraries, computer facilities, projectors, and televisions, are positively and significantly related to the academic performance of primary students in Brazil's system of public education. Furthermore, students' socioeconomic level is positively associated with their academic performance.

Persistence of airline accidents.

This paper expands on air travel accident research by examining the relationship between air travel accidents and airline traffic or volume in the period from 1927-2006. The theoretical model is based on a representative airline company that aims to maximise its profits, and it utilises a fractional integration approach in order to determine whether there is a persistent pattern over time with respect to air accidents and air traffic. Furthermore, the paper analyses how airline accidents are related to traffic using a fractional cointegration approach. It finds that airline accidents are persistent and that a (non-stationary) fractional cointegration relationship exists between total airline accidents and airline passengers, airline miles and airline revenues, with shocks that affect the long-run equilibrium disappearing in the very long term. Moreover, this relation is negative, which might be due to the fact that air travel is becoming safer and there is greater competition in the airline industry. Policy implications are derived for countering accident events, based on competition and regulation.