Using admission lotteries and registry data linking labor market outcomes, we study the effect of a vocational training program focused on disadvantaged individuals in Brazil. The intensive program is an 18-month classroom training coupled with a 6-month on-the-job training provided by government-sponsored training centers. When assessing the impacts on 15,000 winners and 200,000 nonwinners who graduated in different business cycle moments, we show that female students fare better than their male counterparts. Results are driven by courses in services. Investigating outcomes beyond employment and earnings, we do not find an impact on entrepreneurship or university admission. 

The economic literature has shown that exogenous transitory shocks affect education by changing the opportunity cost of children. We argue that this is only part of the explanation. When permanent,  shocks may change contracts and the organization of labor by eroding the productive structure and decreasing land values. This paper studies the long-term effects of a long-lasting environmental shock on individuals' educational achievement and earnings. We investigate the 1988 witches' broom outbreak in Brazil, the world's second-leading cocoa producer at the time. Our results show that crop disease negatively impacted the long-term education and earnings of exposed cohorts living in affected areas. Our findings suggest that an increase in child labor and family farm work, driven by changes in labor contracts and land use, could explain the results. Also, the prevalence of a type of contract frequently tied to modern slavery and child labor, known as meeiros (sharecroppers, in English), increased.

This paper investigates the impact of the Science without Borders (Ciência sem Fronteiras - CSF) program on participants' post-graduation enrollment, employment, and entrepreneurship. The program was launched in 2011 to increase students' human capital and interest in science and postgraduate education studies through a substantial increase in scholarships for Brazilians to carry out part of their undergraduate studies abroad. We exploit variation in the approval rate across CSF selection calls for the same destination country and year and combine seventeen public and private administrative records to track CSF candidates' outcomes up to eight years after the call. The main results suggest that the program did not achieve its goals of increasing approved student enrollment in postgraduate education programs in Brazil. Even though the program could have improved student skills and acted as a market signaling, we do not find effects on the probability of working in the formal labor market, or as formal entrepreneurs. Using detailed data from one top university, we show that approved students graduate more often, but take longer to graduate, which may have negative impacts on their labor market outcomes.  Finally, although we cannot rule out that students moved to a foreign country after the program, we show that the likelihood of this event may have decreased over time.