Poor Little Children: The Socio economic Gap in Parental Responses to School Disadvantage

Abstract

In this paper, we study how parents react to a widely-used school policy that puts some children at a learning disadvantage. Specifically, we first document that, in line with findings in other countries, younger children in Spain perform signif- icantly worse at school than their older peers and - key to causal interpretation - that for children born in winter this effect is not due to birth seasonality. Fur- thermore, the age of school entry effect is significantly greater among children from disadvantaged families. To understand why, we analyze detailed data on parental investment and find that college-educated parents increase their time investment and choose schools with better inputs when their children are the youngest at school entry, while non-college-educated parents do not.