Parents’ Beliefs about Their Children’s Academic Ability: Implications for Educational Investments
在马拉维的实地实验发现，父母对孩子学业表现的认知常不准确；提供清晰易懂的成绩信息后，父母会调整教育投资，为高成绩孩子增加入学、为低成绩孩子减少入学，并选择更匹配孩子水平的投入。
Schools worldwide distribute information to parents about their children’s academic performance. Do frictions prevent parents, particularly low-income parents, from accessing this information to make decisions? A field experiment in Malawi shows that, at baseline, parents’ beliefs about their children’s academic performance are often inaccurate. Providing parents with clear, digestible performance information causes them to update their beliefs and adjust their investments: they increase the school enrollment of their higher-performing children, decrease the enrollment of lower-performing children, and choose educational inputs that are more closely matched to their children’s academic level. Heterogeneity analysis suggests information frictions are worse among the poor.