Report
Parents’ Response to Teacher Qualifications
Simon Chang, Deborah COBB-CLARK, Nicolas Salamanca Acosta
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization | The IZA Institute of Labor Economics | Published : 2020
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..
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Grants
Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank Boer Xia for her excellent research assistance and the Survey Research Data Archive (SRDA) in Taiwan, es-pecially Wan-wen Su, for facilitating our analyses of the Taiwan Education Panel Survey. We thank Alexandra de Gendre, Jan Feld, and Johannes Kunz for their helpful comments, and Melisa Bubonya, Abraham Chigavazira, and Tiffany Ho and Hebe Williams for their excellent research assistance. This research was supported by the University of Melbourne Early Career Researcher Grant Scheme [project number CE140100027] and the Australian Research Council through the Cen-tre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course [project number CE200100025] . The Centre is adminis-tered by the Institute for Social Science Research at The University of Queensland, with nodes at The University of West-ern Australia, The University of Melbourne and The University of Sydney. This paper uses data from the Taiwan Educa-tional Panel Survey (Restricted Access Data) (R010 0 01) [data files: w1_j_s_lv6_0, w2_j_s_lv6.1, w1_j_p_lv6.0, w2_j_p_lv6.0, w1_j_dt_lv6.1, w2_j_dt_lv6.1, w1_j_dtc_lv6.2, w1_j_sch_ov6.0] . Available from Survey Research Data Archive, Academia Sinica. doi:10.6141/TW-SRDA-R010001-1. License number: SRDAR012018001.