Parental Beliefs about Returns to Educational Investments—The Later the Better?

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may AbstractIn this paper, we study parental beliefs about the technology which maps parental investments into future child outcomes. We document that parents perceive late investments as more productive than early investments, and that they perceive investments in different time periods as substitutes.These beliefs contrast with findings in the empirical literature which suggest that early investments are more productive and are complementary to late investments. We show that parental beliefs about the returns to investments vary substantially across the population and that individual beliefs are predictive of actual investment decisions. Moreover, we document that parental beliefs about the productivity of investments differ significantly across socio-economic groups. Perceived returns to parental investments are positively related to household income, thereby potentially contributing to intergenerational earnings persistence.

What Drives Enrolment Gaps in Further Education? The Role of Beliefs in Sequential Schooling Decisions

“…Dominitz and Manski ; Manski ; Cunha et al . 2013; Attanasio and Kaufmann ; Boneva and Rauh ). To elicit beliefs about the non‐pecuniary benefit of being in full‐time education (i.e.…”

Preferences and beliefs in the marriage market for young brides

“…All your answers are confidential and you are free to stop at any time." 27 Vignettes have also been used to identify and correct differences in subjective response scales across individuals ( Banks, Kapteyn, Smith, and Van Soest 2009;Kapteyn, Smith, and van Soest 2007;King, Murray, Salomon, and Tandon 2004) and in previous work on the direct elicitation of beliefs (Boneva and Rauh 2018).…”

“…Shocks causing a daughter to drop out of school are not necessarily linked to a family's finances.11 See also Banerjee, Duflo, Ghatak, and Lafortune (2013) that asks families to rank responses to matrimonial adverts to estimate the strength of caste preferences in marriage in India.12 See Attanasio and Kaufmann (2014),Attanasio and Kaufmann (2017), andBoneva and Rauh (2018) for recent work on direct elicitation of subjective beliefs on returns to education Delavande and Zafar (2018). andArcidiacono, Hotz, and Kang (2012) combine directly elicited beliefs and choice data to estimate dynamic structural models but do not make use of comparisons of choice with and without uncertainty in order to identify beliefs themselves.…”

The Timing of Early Interventions and Child and Maternal Health

“…This information may matter in its own right (i.e., it may be new to parents) or modify parental beliefs (i.e., it may help parents to update their reading of information that they have access to). Recent research documents the importance of parental beliefs-their interpretation of rather than their pure awareness of information-for both child health outcomes and parental investment behaviors (see, for example, Cunha et al, 2013;Attanasio et al, 2015;Boneva and Rauh, 2018;Biroli et al, 2018). Our unique data allow us to explore the question of which elements matter in NHV by using specific nurse registrations and the heterogeneity of effects of NHV across different types of parents.…”