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.

Certificate-Of-Need Regulation and Healthcare Service Quality: Evidence from the Nursing Home Industry.

This quantitative study investigates the effect of certificate-of-need (CON) regulation on the quality of care in the nursing home industry. It uses county-level demographic data from the 48 contiguous US states that are extracted from the American Community Survey (ACS) and cover the years 2012, 2013, and 2014. In doing so, it employs a new set of service quality variables captured from a variety of county-level data sources. Instrumental variables results indicate that health survey scores for nursing homes that are computed by healthcare professionals are about 18-24% lower, depending on the type of nursing home under consideration, in states with CON regulation. We also find that the presence of CON regulation leads to a substitution of lower-quality certified nursing assistant care for higher-quality licensed practical nurse care, regardless of the type of nursing home under consideration.