Maria Tannuri-Pianto

Using Brazil's Racial Continuum to Examine the Short-Term Effects of Affirmative Action in Higher Education

In 2004, the University of Brasilia established racial quotas. We find that quotas raised the proportion of black students, and that displacing applicants were from lower socioeconomic status families than displaced applicants. The evidence suggests that racial quotas did not reduce the preuniversity effort of applicants or students. Additionally, there may have been modest racial disparities in college academic performance among students in selective departments, though the policy did not impact these. The findings also suggest that racial quotas induced some individuals to misrepresent their racial identity but inspired other individuals, especially the darkest-skinned, to consider themselves black.

Endogenous Race in Brazil: Affirmative Action and the Construction of Racial Identity among Young Adults

In this article, we study the construction of racial identity among students at a university that recently adopted racial quotas in admissions. Using data collected by the authors, we find that parents’ race, family socioeconomic status, gender, and racial quotas have a significant effect on self-reported race. The evidence indicates that students in mixed-race families are systematically more likely to identify with their mother’s race than with their father’s. Conditional on skin tone quintile, higher socioeconomic status is associated with lighter racial self-classification, and lower socioeconomic status with darker racial self-classification. Additionally, the results demonstrate that being male is associated with lighter racial self-classification, and being female with darker self-classification. Policy changes may also affect racial identity. After the adoption of racial quotas, students in the darkest two quintiles were less likely to self-identify as branco, those in the fourth quintile were more likely to self-identify as pardo, and those in the darkest quintile were more likely to self-identify as preto.

Medidas de custo-eficiência dos serviços subnacionais de segurança publica no Brasil, 2001-2006

We calculated the efficiencies with which Brazilian states provide public safety by using a stochastic frontier cost function and panel data from 2001-2006. We estimate a Translog with fixed effects where prices for the production factors are the initial salaries of military police, civil police, and precinct chiefs and the product is the inverse of the homicide rate. To explain inefficiencies we use economic and demographic variables which measure active drug markets and the allocation of judicial, police, and penitentiary expenditures. Our models indicate that inefficiencies are higher when the size of drug markets, the ratio of military to civil police, the rate of high school dropouts, and income inequality increase. On the other hand, increasing judicial expenditures and the number of prison cells reduce inefficiency. Sao Paulo is the most cost efficient state providing public safety, whereas the Federal District is the least cost efficient.

Fronteiras de eficiência estocásticas para as empresas de distribuição de energia elétrica no Brasil: uma análise de dados de painel

This paper analyzes the efficiency of the Brazilian electrical sector distributing companies based on an econometrics study of information and data that directly affect distributing companies´ efficiency, such as operational cost, number of employees, volume of energy supplied, and some qualitative indicators, such as the percentage of energy lost, average duration of the supply interruption per year in hours (DEC) and average frequency of the supply interruption per year (FEC). Besides these, some socio-economic indicators are considered, such as appliances ownership and the demographic density of the area each company is located. The analysis starts with the definition of production and cost frontiers, followed by the production and cost frontier functions, applying the Stochastic Frontier Method.

Inside the black box: affirmative action and the social construction of race in Brazil

The recent adoption of race-targeted public policies makes Brazil an insightful place to study the social construction of race. This article estimates the effect of racial quotas in college admissions on patterns of racial identification. The authors collected data on persons who matriculated before and after the implementation of quotas at the University of Brasilia, which reserved 20% of admissions slots for persons who self-identified as black. A baseline survey was conducted during college and a follow-up survey was conducted post-college. In sum, the findings suggest that racial quotas had inspired a persistent shift in racial identification from non-black to black and from lighter to darker racial categories. As a whole, the evidence indicates that the policy induced race-making boundary effects, which broadly confirms the insights of social constructionist theories.

Contagion in the Brazilian interbank currency exchange market: an empirical analysis

The risk of contagion is the possibility that the failure of a financial institution affected by an exogenous shock generates the failure of other institutions not initially affected by the shock. As pointed out by Upper and Worms (2002) and others, the domino effect in the payment system depends on the precise pattern of interbank linkages. This paper studies the occurrence of financial contagion after the exogenous failure of an institution authorized to operate in the Brazilian interbank currency market. The data contain information about all the actual transactions that occurred in this market from August 1st, 2000 to October 31st, 2002. The adopted methodology shows the occurrence of contagion propagation in several subsequent rounds after the initial failure. We quantify the number of institutions that breakdown and the financial losses of the market. There is a large increase in the number of failed institutions during the period of the presidential elections in 2002.

Residual and Technical Tax Efficiency Scores for Brazilian Municipalities: a Two-Stage Approach

Recurrent fiscal imbalances in terms of tax and expenditure assign-ments among central and local governments are a critical issue in public finance. To equalize tax capacities, cope with spillovers or to achieve national policy objectives, central governments often provide transfers to lower levels of government. These transfers may affect the incentives to improve fiscal performance because they may induce low tax effort in the regions (Litvack, Ahmad and Bird, 1998; Boadway