Parent-Child Information Frictions and Human Capital Investment: Evidence from a Field Experiment

462 students in one K-12 school in a low-income area of Los Angeles, 2010-2011

Middle- and high-school students and their parents

Individually randomised: parents received biweekly information about their child's missed assignments. Single school, so the estimate is not a scale estimate; the mechanism claim (parents hold upwardly biased beliefs about their child's effort, and correcting the belief changes behaviour) is the transferable part.

GPA rose about 0.19-0.20 SD and standardized mathematics scores about 0.21 SD; there was no significant effect on English test scores. The intervention is not instruction at all — the parent supplies monitoring and accountability, not teaching — and it produces an effect comparable to the parent-tutoring arm of the tutoring meta-analysis at a fraction of the parental time cost.

Low — randomised, single-site.

Unreplicated at this design; the broader class of parent-information nudges is replicated (see the archive's attendance topic and York/Loeb/Doss's READY4K), generally at smaller magnitudes than this single-school trial.