Dr. Gustavo Moreira (p), Dr. Vania Ceccato

Trust in the police is widely regarded as central to citizens’ willingness to engage with law enforcement, yet its association with crime reporting varies across offenses and social contexts. This paper examines how trust in the police shapes reporting decisions for property crimes in Brazil and how this relationship interacts with race and crime characteristics. Using nationally representative data from the 2021 Brazilian victimization survey, the analysis focuses on victims of theft and robbery and conceptualizes reporting as a post-victimization decision made under conditions of institutional uncertainty, in which individuals weigh expected benefits, anticipated costs, and the practical consequences of contacting law enforcement. Based on a sample of N = 3,417 theft victims and N = 677 robbery victims, separate probit models are estimated for each crime type and results are presented as average marginal effects. Trust in the police is positively associated with reporting in all specifications, but its magnitude differs substantially across offenses. The association is modest for theft and considerably stronger for robbery, indicating that trust becomes more consequential in confrontational and high-uncertainty contexts where discretion and expectations about police behavior are more salient. Racial disparities persist across all models: nonwhite victims are consistently less likely to report both theft and robbery, even after controlling for trust, socioeconomic characteristics, prior victimization, neighborhood context, and regional location, with larger gaps observed for robbery. These patterns suggest that racial inequality shapes engagement with the criminal justice system beyond differences in expressed trust. Crime attributes linked to administrative or economic stakes, particularly vehicle-related incidents and cases involving documents or mobile phones, substantially increase reporting probabilities, in some cases exceeding the effect associated with trust in the police. Reporting therefore reflects not only attitudes toward law enforcement but also procedural requirements embedded in insurance and bureaucratic systems. Overall, the findings show that crime reporting in Brazil reflects structured differences in institutional engagement shaped by trust, inequality, crime type, and practical necessity, rather than a uniform expression of police legitimacy.

Prof. Nicola Pontarollo (p), Maria Cesani, Prof. Joselin Segovia

In Latin America, violence has increased markedly in recent years, raising concerns about its broader social and economic consequences. Among these, the potential impact on students’ academic performance is particularly alarming, given its implications for human capital accumulation and long-term development. Using detailed annual school-level data from Ecuador—a country that has experienced a dramatic rise in crime over the past decade—we examine whether and to what extent crime in the neighbourhoods surrounding schools affects academic outcomes. We focus on standardized test scores administered annually, exploiting repeated cross-sectional data covering the period 2014–2024 and comprising approximately 100,000 student-level observations.
Our results indicate that crime and violence in the vicinity of schools have a statistically and economically significant negative effect on students’ performance. While we do not find substantial differences between male and female students or consistent heterogeneity across broad regions, the adverse impact is significantly stronger for schools located in urban areas, which exhibit a much sharper decline in performance compared to rural schools.
These findings highlight that educational policy cannot be designed independently of public security conditions. In high-crime contexts, improving learning outcomes requires coordinated interventions that enhance neighbourhood safety and protect school environments. Targeted security measures around schools, additional resources for urban schools in violent areas, and investments in psychological support and compensatory educational programs may help mitigate the negative externalities of crime. More broadly, reducing violence should be viewed not only as a public safety priority but also as a central component of human capital policy, as persistent exposure to crime risks undermining educational achievement, increasing inequality, and constraining long-term economic development in the region.

Carlos Moreira, Prof. Carla Sá (p)

Regional disparities in educational outcomes represent one of the most persistent and policy-relevant dimensions of socio-spatial inequality within European countries. Beyond their social significance, such disparities have long-run implications for regional economic convergence, labour productivity, and the intergenerational transmission of inequality. In Portugal, a country characterised by pronounced territorial imbalances between coastal and interior areas and between metropolitan and rural regions, understanding the geographic dimension of educational achievement is particularly urgent. Despite sustained public investment in education and the adoption of EU cohesion objectives, regional gaps in student performance remain substantial. The COVID-19 pandemic added a further layer of urgency, as school closures and the abrupt shift to distance learning are widely expected to have amplified pre-existing socioeconomic and spatial inequalities in learning outcomes, though rigorous microeconometric evidence for the Portuguese case remains scarce.
This paper investigates the determinants of academic achievement among Portuguese students aged 15–16, with particular emphasis on regional heterogeneity and its evolution over time. Building on Pereira and Reis (2012), it provides an updated and extended analysis using microdata from the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for 2018 and 2022, complemented by regional statistics from INE. The dual time dimension enables a direct comparison of regional disparities before and after the pandemic, shedding new light on how this exogenous shock reshaped educational inequalities across Portuguese territory.
The analysis covers 11 aggregated regions derived from NUTS III classifications, focusing on Mathematics and Reading scores. The empirical strategy follows an education production function framework estimated via OLS with school fixed effects. A second-stage regression decomposes residual school-level fixed effects into observable school characteristics and regional fixed effects. Variance decomposition further disentangles the relative contributions of family background, school resources, and the socio-spatial sorting of disadvantaged families into worse schools to overall within-region performance inequality.
Results confirm that family socioeconomic status dominates school-level characteristics across all regions and time periods. Marked territorial heterogeneity persists, with regional development indicators significantly correlated with unconditional performance gaps. Regional disparities widened in 2022, with schools proving less effective at compensating for family disadvantage in the post-pandemic period and, in several regions, actively exacerbating pre-existing inequalities through socio-spatial sorting mechanisms. These findings point to the structural limitations of a centralised education system in addressing place-specific needs, and carry direct implications for the design of place-sensitive educational and cohesion policies.