Kristof De Witte
Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven, Belgium

Abstract:
Parents play a crucial role in the education of their children. This study investigates if the important role of parents can be exploited by means of targeted parental involvement measures at school in order to improve students’ knowledge and behaviour. Based on two randomized controlled trials with in total 2,779 students from grade 8 and 9 in Flanders, we provide causal evidence on the effects of parental involvement on students’ learning in a financial education course. Using an experimental design with three treatment groups, we identify the impact of parental involvement in homework separately from the impact of the classroom intervention and homework itself. Intent-to-treat estimation shows that the intervention effectively improves students’ knowledge and behaviour. A combination of a classroom intervention with a homework assignment completed together with parents increases financial literacy by 0.35 standard deviations. The results hold when accounting for completion of the homework assignment. The added value of a homework assignment with parents appears to be largely capturing the effect of homework itself. However, involving parents in the homework has positive effects for students with a low socio-economic status and students with a low level of family communication on the topic. The findings suggest that the positive effects of parental involvement derive from increased family communication between students and parents about the course topics.

Kristof De Witte is a professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business at KU Leuven, Belgium, and he holds the chair in ‘Effectiveness and Efficiency of Educational Innovations’ at United Nations University (UNU-MERIT) at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. Kristof De Witte is further a Fellow member of the CESifo Network, and of the Finish VATT Institute for Economic Research. At KU Leuven he coordinates the higher secondary teacher training program in economics, and the research group ‘Leuven Economics of Education Research’. The research interests of Kristof De Witte comprise education economics, performance evaluation and political economy. His research is funded by various national and international organizations. He published his work in many leading academic journals including ‘The Economic Journal’, ‘Journal of Urban Economics’, ‘European Journal of Operational Research’, ‘Economics of Education Review’, ‘European Journal of Political Economy’ and ‘Scientometrics’.

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