Attainment in secondary school

Abstract

We estimate an education production function in which attainment depends upon parental inputs, peer group inputs, and schooling inputs. We find that parenting is much more important than schooling. The most powerful parental input is parental interest in education for which OLS does not give upward bias as Plowden (1967) suspected. We also find a strong peer group effect. The school pupil-teacher ratio does not enter significantly. A simulation study of the properties of our estimators indicates that our conclusions are robust.