Contribuição do trabalho dos jovens que abandonaram o ensino médio nos rendimentos das famílias: uma comparação com o Programa Pé-de-Meia

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the impact of young people's decision to work and drop out of high school on the income of Brazilian families, focusing on the youth population aged 15 to 24. Additionally, it seeks to compare these results with the Pé-de-Meia Program, evaluating whether the financial incentives of this policy are compatible with the contribution that working students make to their household income. To this end, the incentive value was calculated on a monthly basis and converted to present value. Using microdata from the 2024 Continuous PNAD, the Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM) algorithm was applied in combination with Propensity Score Matching (PSM), followed by a sensitivity analysis to assess the robustness of the results. The findings reveal that young people who drop out of school to work during high school significantly increase their families' income compared to families whose youth are enrolled in school and do not work. The most conservative method used showed a per capita household income contribution of R$ 282.59. This amount exceeds the monthly financial incentives of the Pé-de-Meia Program by approximately 21%, indicating that the transfers offered are insufficient to fully offset the economic contribution of school dropout. The sensitivity test proposed by Nannicini (2007) confirms the robustness of the results. Finally, the contribution to household income from youth who work and have dropped out of high school was analyzed using as a control group those who work and are still enrolled at this level; however, the results were not statistically significant.