Nicolas Salamanca

Title: Parents' Behavioral Response to Teacher Qualifications

Abstract: We identify the causal effect of teacher qualifications on the resources (i.e. attention, time, and money) that parents invest in their children exploiting unique data from an educational system with the legal requirement for schools to randomly assign teachers and students to classes. We find that parents react to higher homeroom teacher qualification with additional monetary investments of their own. Parents whose children are exogenously assigned to teachers with post-graduate degrees subsequently spend on average 5.3 percent of a standard deviation more on tutoring for their children. Highly educated parents react much more strongly to teacher quality; increasing their monetary investments in their children’s education by a quarter of a standard deviation and complementing teacher quality by increasing the discipline and warmth with which they parent their children. There are also stronger complementarities for higher-income parents, and parents who have higher teacher-parent contact. This complementary investment behavior by parents explains between 7 and 14 percent of the effect of teacher qualifications on subsequent standardized achievement scores

Presenter: Nicolas Salamanca, Melbourne Institute

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