Parents' Responses to Teacher Qualifications

Simon Chang, Deborah Cobb-Clark and Nicolas Salamanca

Melbourne Institute Working Paper Series from Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne

Abstract: We identify the causal effect of teacher qualifications on parents’ investments in their children. Exploiting a unique, high-stakes educational setting in which teachers are randomly assigned to classes, we show that parents react to more qualified teachers by increasing their financial investments in their children. The key mechanism is an increase in parents’ belief that academic achievement is driven by student effort—for which financial investment is instrumental. However, higher teacher qualifications do not improve student test scores. This is likely due to a negative effect of teacher qualifications on students’ belief in the importance of effort for academic achievement. Our findings uncover various family-wide behavioral reactions to teacher qualifications and highlight the intricacies in educational production within households.

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)
Pages: 54pp
Date: 2020-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-his and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Parents’ responses to teacher qualifications (2022)
Working Paper: Parents' Responses to Teacher Qualifications (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iae:iaewps:wp2020n01

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