Parents’ responses to teacher qualifications

Simon Chang, Deborah Cobb-Clark and Nicolas Salamanca

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2022, vol. 197, issue C, 419-446

Abstract: We identify the causal effect of children being assigned to more highly qualified teachers on their parents’ investments. Exploiting a unique setting in which teachers are randomly assigned to classes, we show that parents respond to more qualified teachers by increasing their children's private tutoring. A potential mechanism is an increase in parents’ belief that achievement is driven by student effort—for which tutoring is instrumental. Teacher qualifications are unrelated to test scores, however. Instead, they weaken students’ beliefs that effort is important for achievement, suggesting that private tutoring may have a demotivating effect on students. We conclude that family-wide behavioral reactions are important in educational production.

Keywords: Teacher quality; Student achievement; Parental investment; Beliefs; School effort (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 I21 I24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268122000919
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Parents' Responses to Teacher Qualifications (2020)
Working Paper: Parents' Responses to Teacher Qualifications (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:197:y:2022:i:c:p:419-446

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2022.03.009

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D.

More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().