Working Paper: NBER ID: w24610
Authors: 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.
Keywords: Educational Investments; Parental Beliefs; Information Frictions
JEL Codes: D80; I20; I24; I25
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Providing performance information (Y10) | Updating beliefs about children's academic abilities (I24) |
| Updating beliefs about children's academic abilities (I24) | Adjusting investments (G11) |
| Providing performance information (Y10) | Adjusting investments (G11) |
| Information intervention (L86) | Increasing the slope of the relationship between true performance and investments (D29) |