This study is about a country with per-capita GDP about 100 times smaller than that of the U.S., but even in developed countries, parents face decisions about how much support children should be given in attending college, private schools, and after-school programs. Questions of equity vs. efficiency arise.
Parents' Beliefs About Their Children's Academic Ability: Implications for Educational Investments by Rebecca Dizon-Ross - #24610 (CH DEV ED)
NBER
May 21, 2018
Abstract:
Information about children's school performance appears to be
readily available. Do frictions prevent parents, particularly
poor 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.
