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Parents' Beliefs About Their Children's Academic Ability: Implications for Educational Investments

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  • Rebecca Dizon-Ross

Abstract

Information about children’s school performance appears to be readily available. Do frictions prevent parents, particularly low-income parents, from acting on this information when making decisions? I conduct a field experiment in Malawi to test this. I find that parents’ baseline beliefs about their children’s academic performance are inaccurate. Providing parents with clear and digestible academic performance information causes them to update their beliefs and correspondingly adjust their investments: they increase the school enrollment of their higher-performing children, decrease the enrollment of their lower-performing children, and choose educational inputs that are more closely matched to their children’s academic level. These effects demonstrate the presence of important frictions preventing the use of available information, with heterogeneity analysis suggesting the frictions are worse among the poor.

Suggested Citation

  • Rebecca Dizon-Ross, 2018. "Parents' Beliefs About Their Children's Academic Ability: Implications for Educational Investments," NBER Working Papers 24610, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24610
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    Cited by:

    1. Pushkar Maitra & Nidhiya Menon & Chau Tran, 2019. "The Winter’s Tale: Season of Birth Impacts on Children in China," Monash Economics Working Papers 09-18, Monash University, Department of Economics.
    2. Jessica Leight & Elaine M. Liu, 2020. "Maternal Education, Parental Investment, and Noncognitive Characteristics in Rural China," Economic Development and Cultural Change, University of Chicago Press, vol. 69(1), pages 213-251.
    3. Jonas Hjort & Diana Moreira & Gautam Rao & Juan Francisco Santini, 2021. "How Research Affects Policy: Experimental Evidence from 2,150 Brazilian Municipalities," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 111(5), pages 1442-1480, May.
    4. Federico A. Bugni & Ivan A. Canay & Azeem M. Shaikh, 2019. "Inference under covariate‐adaptive randomization with multiple treatments," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 10(4), pages 1747-1785, November.
    5. Martin Wiegand, 2019. "Do early-ending conditional cash transfer programs crowd out school enrollment?," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 19-053/V, Tinbergen Institute.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D80 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - General
    • I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General
    • I24 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Education and Inequality
    • I25 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Education and Economic Development

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