【题  目】How Parents’ Beliefs About Their Children’s Academic Ability Affect Educational Investments

【时  间】2023年11月1日（星期三），14:00-15:30

【地  点】后主楼 1610会议室

【主讲人】干天琪 助理教授（中国人民大学经济学院）

【主持人】何浩然 教授（15vip太阳集团）

 

摘要： Using a randomized field experiment with parents of high school students in China, I examine the causal effects of parents' belief in their children's ability on educational investment and children's academic performance. I document two types of information frictions that result in systematic biases in parents' beliefs about children's ability: overconfidence in future performance and underestimating college admission requirements. I then introduce two interventions to correct parents' belief biases. In the first intervention, I use machine-learning techniques to generate predictions on children's future academic performance and distribute them to randomly selected parents. In the second intervention, I give randomly selected parents a report that lists the feasible colleges corresponding to their children's current academic performance. I find that both interventions lead to dramatic reductions in belief biases. In addition, parents report higher levels of monetary investments in children's education, which significantly improved children's academic performance. I also find significant non-linearity for the impacts of ability belief on parental educational investments around their aspirations.

 

报告人简介：

 

 

干天琪，中国人民大学经济学院讲师，博士毕业于马里兰大学帕克分校，主要研究领域为发展经济学，实验经济学和应用计量经济学，其研究涉及家长对子女的教育投资决策、信息摩擦、同群效应等方向。曾多次在美国经济学会年会（AEA），美国农业与应用经济学会年会（AAEA），欧洲环境与资源经济学家学会（EAERE）等国际会议上报告自己的学术研究与成果。