Houtenville, Andrew J., and Karen Smith Conway. 2008. “Parental Effort, School Resources, and Student Achievement.” Journal of Human Resources 43(2): 437–453.
This article investigates an important factor in student achievement—parental involvement. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS), we estimate a value-added education production function that includes parental effort as an input. Parental effort equations are also estimated as a function of child, parent, household, and school characteristics. Our results suggest that parental effort has a strong positive effect on achievement that is large relative to the effect of school resources and is not captured by family background variables. Parents appear to reduce their effort in response to increased school resources, suggesting potential “crowding out” of school resources.
Andrew J. Houtenville is a senior research associate at Cornell University, School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Employment and Disability Institute. Karen Smith Conway is a professor of economics at the University of New Hampshire. Earlier versions of this research were presented at the meetings of the American Economic Association, Econometric Society, and Southern Economic Association Meetings, and seminars at Butler University, University of Connecticut, IUPUI, the University of New Hampshire and Syracuse University. This paper has benefited tremendously from the comments of those present at these presentations. The authors are especially indebted to Paul Carlin, Thomas Downes, David Figlio, Thomas Nechyba, Robert Sandy, Stanley Sedo, and Randy Walsh for their helpful suggestions. Researchers may obtain this data by application to the National Center for Education Statistics. The authors of this article will be happy to advise other researchers about the application process.