Job Market Paper
Job Market Paper
Tracking, Tutoring, and Testing: The Role of (Other) Parents' Investments in Student Achievement
Abstract: This paper investigates the causal effect of parental investment in private tutoring on student outcomes in Hungary’s tracked education system. Focusing on high-track students, I examine whether tutoring complements school-based instruction, particularly for students with limited prior resources or lower prior achievement. Using the double-debiased machine learning (DDML) framework, I estimate treatment effects while addressing selection bias and high-dimensional confounding. Findings suggest that while one's own participation in extracurricular tutoring has limited effects on student outcomes, the degree to which one's peers participate in tutoring has a sizeable positive effect. That is, there are statistically significant spillover effects of the parental investments of peers. This study contributes to understanding the role of supplementary education in mediating track-related academic benefits and its implications for educational inequality.