Empirical research documents persistent socioeconomic and race gaps in parental investments in children. This article presents a formal model that describes the process through which parents’ beliefs about the returns on investments in children evolve over time in light of new information that they receive regarding the outcomes of past investments. The model, which is based on Bayesian learning, accounts for how parents of low socioeconomic status may come to underinvest in their children because they have false low beliefs about the returns on investments. Moreover, the model describes how beliefs are transmitted across generations, thus creating dynasties of underinvesting parents who reproduce inequalities in children’s socioeconomic outcomes. Finally, this article uses National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data to provide illustrative empirical evidence on key aspects of the proposed model. The main contribution of this article is to integrate parents’ beliefs about returns on investments into existing models of intergenerational transmissions.

中文翻译：

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信念、父母投资和代际坚持：一个正式模型

实证研究记录了父母对孩子的投资中持续存在的社会经济和种族差距。本文提出了一个正式模型，该模型描述了父母对儿童投资回报的信念随着时间推移根据他们收到的有关过去投资结果的新信息而演变的过程。该模型基于贝叶斯学习，解释了社会经济地位低的父母如何可能会因为他们对投资回报的错误信念而对孩子投资不足。此外，该模型描述了信仰如何跨代传递，从而创造了父母投资不足的王朝，他们在儿童的社会经济成果中再现了不平等。最后，本文使用全国青年纵向调查数据提供关于所提出模型关键方面的说明性经验证据。本文的主要贡献是将父母对投资回报的信念整合到现有的代际传递模型中。