The external effect of better-educated parents on student academic outcome

ABSTRACT

This paper exploits the random assignment rule embedded in Chinese education system to investigate the external effect of better-educated parents in a class on students’ academic outcomes. Using a representative sample of Chinese middle school students, our estimation results show that a higher share of classmates with college-educated parents helps improve test scores of the students in the class. We further show that such external effect may arise from positive interactions between parents.

KEYWORDS:

• Random assignment
• peer interaction
• academic outcome
• human capital

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ To maintain sufficient sample size, we randomly drop 2 schools from the baseline sample in the exercises. We also randomly exclude 3 or 4 schools from 62 schools, and the patterns of the results are similar to that depicted in Figure 2.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [71873123, 72034006], National Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences [18FJY026], and Social Science Fund of Zhejiang Province [20JDZD004].