TY  - JOUR
AU  - Jacob,Brian A.
AU  - Lefgren,Lars
TI  - What Do Parents Value in Education? An Empirical Investigation of Parents' Revealed Preferences for Teachers
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11494
PY  - 2005
Y2  - July 2005
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11494
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11494.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Brian Jacob
Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy
University of Michigan
735 South State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Tel: 734-615-6994
Fax: NA
E-Mail: bajacob@umich.edu

Lars Lefgren
Department of Economics
Brigham Young University
130 Faculty Office Bulding
Provo, UT 84602-2363
Tel: (801) 422-5169
E-Mail: l-lefgren@byu.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2006-03-01
AB  - This paper examines revealed parent preferences for their children's education using a unique data set that includes the number of parent requests for individual elementary school teachers along with information on teacher attributes including principal reports of teacher characteristics that are typically unobservable.  We find that, on average, parents strongly prefer teachers that principals describe as good at promoting student satisfaction and place relatively less value on a teacher's ability to raise standardized math or reading achievement.  These aggregate effects, however, mask striking differences across family demographics.  Families in higher poverty schools strongly value student achievement and are essentially indifferent to the principal's report of a teacher's ability to promote student satisfaction.  The results are reversed for families in higher-income schools.
ER  -