Loading...
Please wait, while we are loading the content...
Similar Documents
Parents ’ Beliefs and Children ’ s Education : Experimental Evidence from Malawi ⇤
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Dizon-Ross, Rebecca |
| Copyright Year | 2016 |
| Abstract | Do parents’ inaccurate beliefs about their children’s academic performance cause them to misallocate their educational investments? I conduct a field experiment in Malawi and find that providing parents with academic performance information causes them to reallocate their investments, roughly tripling the correlation of investments with academic performance. For example, most parents believe that schooling is more valuable for higher performers; information thus increases retention in school among higher-performing students and decreases retention among lower-performing students. Parents’ reallocations a↵ect a broad range of outcomes, including textbook purchases, retention in primary school, and resources for secondary school. The evidence also suggests that poorer parents have less accurate beliefs than richer, more-educated parents, and often respond more to information. Inaccurate beliefs may thus exacerbate inequalities between richer and poorer households or societies. ⇤I am very grateful to Pascaline Dupas, Caroline Hoxby, and Seema Jayachandran for their guidance, and to Ran Abramitzky, Abhijit Banerjee, Jim Berry, Marianne Bertrand, Nick Bloom, Doug Bernheim, Manasi Deshpande, Celine Dizon, Elise Dizon-Ross, Natalie Douvos, Esther Duflo, Alex Eble, Liran Einav, Nick Hagerty, Rema Hanna, Johannes Haushofer, Yael Hochberg, Anil Jain, Asim Khwaja, Anjini Kochar, Dan Lee, Shirlee Lichtman, Matthew Lowe, Rachael Meager, Ben Olken, Arianna Ornaghi, Jonah Rocko↵, Sheldon Ross, Ashish Shenoy, Fabiana Silva, Melanie Wasserman, Tom Wollmann, Jenny Ying, Owen Zidar and workshop participants at Stanford, MIT, and Harvard, and seminar participants at Princeton, Yale, Columbia, University of Chicago, Chicago Booth, Northwestern, Harvard Business School, Stanford GSB, UCLA, UCSD, Stanford, Columbia Teacher’s College, NBER Development Fall 2014, NBER Education Spring 2014, PacDEV 2014, and NEUDC 2013 for helpful comments and discussions. I thank Bridget Ho↵mann, Rachel Levenson, and Michael Roscitt for help with the fieldwork, and Christine Cai for excellent research assistance. I appreciate the generous support of the Endowment in Memory of B.F. Haley and E.S. Shaw, Innovations for Poverty Action, the National Science Foundation (DDRIG 1156155), the Russell Sage Foundation, the Shultz Graduate Student Fellowship, SIEPR, the Stanford Economics Department, and the DDRO and GRO Funds. All errors are my own. Contact: rdr@chicagobooth.edu. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1257/rct.1808-1.0 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://www.povertyactionlab.org/sites/default/files/publications/5018_Parents_beliefs-and-Childrens-Education_Rebeccca_Dizon-Ross_November2016.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.1808-1.0 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
