What about the parents? Designing post-primary policies that encourage parent investment

The effects of education policies depend on individuals’ behavioral responses, which can either enhance or undo the policies’ intended impacts. This project aims to understand one important aspect of parental behavior -- how parents allocate their investments across their children, and whether they are motivated by a desire to maximize returns (earnings) or equalize across their children – and use that knowledge to design (and test) better post-primary education policies. In the pilot phase, I will estimate parents’ preferences for education spending, quantifying the relative weight they place on returns maximization, equality of inputs, and equality of outcomes, using lab-in-the-field experiments. Based on this, I will determine the implications for how to design better post-primary education policies, including how to optimize the design of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) to maximize positive spillovers. The pilot will then lead directly into an RCT testing the standard policy relative to the new one optimized to parents’ preferences. This application is for funding for the pilot phase. The pilot findings will be useful not just for the RCT but for any future research on post-primary education policies like CCTs and information.

*To learn more about key findings from this evaluation read Not Playing Favorites: An Experiment on Parental Preferences for Educational Investment and Parents' Beliefs about Their Children's Academic Ability: Implications for Educational Investments