Oferta de escolas e retorno do ensino médio entre os jovens no Brasil

Schooling attendance improved significantly in Brazil, mainly for primary schooling. Attendance levels however are still deficient at secondary level; where dropout levels also worries policy makers. This paper aims to estimate the wage premium for secondary education attained by young workers aged 20 to 24 in Brazil; as this could potentially lead to low levels of interest for attending secondary schools. We take into account the endogeneity of education in the wage equation, by employing a set of instruments that capture the supply density of schools in the municipality when the young worker was 15 years old; considered as the entry age for secondary school. The return estimates obtained by the method of instrumental variables ranged from 11% to 20%. The results also indicate that measures of school supply have a positive and significant relationship with the probability of a young person having completed high school.