Information, Family Educational Investment, and Children's Learning

Abstract

Information plays a central role in human decision making. In education, it could affect parents' educational investment decisions and children's learning behaviors; both would fundamentally influence education outcomes. Focusing on information about children's academic performance, this dissertation aims to examine the interrelated topics of information interventions, family educational investment, and children's learning, and provide rigorous evidence on the role of information in education. The first chapter, How Does Family Educational Investment Depend on Children’s Academic Ability? An Experiment on Information Shocks, studies how children's academic ability affects family financial and non-financial investments by using an experimental method. The second chapter, Heterogeneous Effects of Providing Performance Information in Education: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment with Causal Forests, uses a causal forest approach to examine the treatment effect heterogeneity of a common school practice, sending parents information about their children's academic performance, on parents' educational investment. The third chapter, How Do Children Respond? Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Providing Performance Information, assesses the experimental impacts of mitigating parent-child information frictions regarding academic performance on children's learning outcomes and behaviors and their non-cognitive skills. The findings of this dissertation deepen our understanding of the roles of information in parental education investment decisions and children's learning behaviors. Moreover, this dissertation informs policymaking by exploring how performance information can be strategically used to improve educational outcomes and how policy effectiveness can be enhanced by accounting for the diverse characteristics of children and families.