term the stakes are higher, and students avoid larger amounts of debt. We also find that the program led to a lower likelihood of having loans with repayment delays in the long run, by about 0.9 percentage point, compared to 15 percent of control students who have loans with repayment delays.

To study the effects of the program on entrepreneurship, we use data on formal business ownership that is available in the BCB administrative records. The MEI (individual microentrepreneur) data set covers about 42 percent of all registered businesses in Brazil. We examine the effect on formal microenterprise ownership for two post-program periods: (i) one to seven years after graduating, when students may still have been in university; and (ii) eight to nine years after graduating, when most students were most likely in the labor market. We find that treatment group students are not more likely to be microentrepreneurs than control students one to seven years after graduating, but eight to nine years after graduating, treatment students are 10 percent more likely to own a formal microenterprise than control students (a 0.69 percentage point increase relative to 6.9 percent of control students with an MEI). We also find that treatment group students are 1.2 percentage points less likely to hold a formal job, i.e., a job with a written contract, relative to 49.5 percent of control students with a formal job, suggesting that the financial education program caused them to switch occupations from being employees to being business owners.

These effects on employment outcomes may be attributed to the fact that the program was comprehensive and included modules on work and entrepreneurship. A related study by Chioda et al. (2021) examines the labor market effects of a 3-week entrepreneurship program for high school students in Uganda. Data from a follow-up survey, conducted 3.5 years after the program ended, shows that the program increased the probability of having a business by about 6 percentage points, relative to 33.6 percent of control students who reported owning a business. The percentage of students with a business is much smaller in our sample (6.9 percent), in part because we use administrative data and thus focus on businesses that are registered with the government. The percentage increase in students with a business found by Chioda et al. (2021), about 18 percent, is larger than the 10 percent increase in formal business ownership we observe in our data. A reason for the smaller effect in our study could be that the financial education program in Brazil dedicated two out of nine modules to work and entrepreneurship, while the program in Uganda focused entirely on entrepreneurship.

We also examine a proxy for informal employment derived from data on a COVID-19 pandemic government transfer distribution in 2020. This proxy provides weak evidence that the financial education intervention increased the share of students in the informal sector. We cannot disentangle whether these students are owners of informal firms or employees who are not registered with the government. However, we suspect that the effect is driven by informal business owners, not employees, since our other results show that the financial education program increased formal microenterprise ownership. Some students who started their own business likely started informal businesses since nearly two-thirds of businesses in Brazil are informal (Ulyssea 2018).

Tying these results together, we find that the high-school financial education program had significant and lasting effects on long-run economic behavior related to credit use and employment outcomes. The program shifted employment from formal sector jobs to entrepreneurship, which 4