Parent-Child Information Frictions and Human Capital Investment: Evidence from a Field Experiment

By Peter Bergman. Journal of Political Economy, 2020

167 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper studies information frictions between parents and children and their effect on human capital investments. I provide biweekly information to a random sample of parents about their child’s missed assignments. Parents have upwardly biased beliefs about their child’s effort. Providing information attenuates this bias and improves student achievement. Using data from the experiment, I estimate a persuasion game between parents and their children that shows that the treatment effect is due to more accurate beliefs and reduced monitoring costs. Policy simulations from the model demonstrate that improving school reporting or providing more information to parents can increase learning at low cost.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cc723f5df7b6efd215b220c2f7fffa8ffc4d01db

Citations in the corpus

• Parents’ Beliefs about Their Children’s Academic Ability: Implications for Educational Investments (2019, unknown): “, Jensen (2010)), or statistics that require another entity's private information, such as school-average student performance or normally-unreleased data on student e ort in school (Andrabi et al., 2016; Bergman, 2016).”
• Negotiating a Better Future: How Interpersonal Skills Facilitate Intergenerational Investment* (2018, unknown): “Second, this paper contributes to a growing literature on intra-household bargaining and inefficiencies in investment within the household (Udry, 1996; Ashraf, 2009; De Mel et al., 2009; Bobonis, 2009; Doepke and Tertilt, 2014; Robinson, 2012; Schaner, 2015; Angelucci and Garlick, 2016; Corno and Vo”