Essays in Development and Demography

In this dissertation, I explore factors that contribute to disparities in parental beliefs about children's academic proficiency across socioeconomic lines and by child gender, drawing on evidence from India, Kenya, and the United States. In all three contexts, I find a strong correlation between socioeconomic status and parental beliefs, where high income parents and those from more privileged social groups are more likely to believe their children are above average academically compared to their lower income or less privileged peers. That these patterns exist after accounting for actual test performance suggests that disparities in beliefs outpace any gaps in performance along these same lines. Parental beliefs could be consequential to the extent they guide educational investments and so shape eventual outcomes. Viewed in this way, disparities in parental beliefs along socioeconomic lines could play some role in the persistence of disparities in educational and other outcomes along these same lines.The first chapter of this dissertation explores the link between poverty and parental beliefs in the Indian context. I leverage the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), a nationally-representative panel dataset, to explore the link between poverty or social disadvantage and parental beliefs in detail. I find that parents in poor households and those belonging to one of India's more disadvantaged caste groups are substantially less likely to believe their children are above average academically. I also find that context plays an important role; parental beliefs tend to be more positive in high-mobility or low-poverty districts, and even more so for wealthy than for poor parents. Finally, I find that parental beliefs respond negatively to exogenous negative income shocks driven by adverse rainfall events. These findings suggest that the observed link between socioeconomic status and parental beliefs may be more than purely correlational. Instead, poverty and other forms of disadvantage may fundamentally shape ...