Using a French employer-employee dataset, I document large disagreement rates between employer reports and self-reports of workers' educational attainment. My estimates of a model for the data generating process indicate that, when both are available, employer reports are correct for about 85% of the sample, while self-reports are accurate for almost 92% of observations. I also test whether wages are related to employers' mistakes, and find that overstatements of worker education pay a positive wagepremium, whereas under-statements are not linked to significant differences in wages.

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This paper presents a randomized field experiment in French middle schools located in deprived neighborhoods. An outreach effort invited volunteer parents in test classes to be more involved with the education of their 11 year old children and raised their awareness about the functioning of the school. We evaluate the impacts of this parental support and involvement program using a clustered design. At the end of the school-year, we find that treated families effectively increased their school- and homebased involvement activities. The children of families who were directly targeted by the program developed more positive behavior and attitudes in school, and their results improved in French, but not in mathematics. Importantly, for all behavioral outcomes we find large indirect effects of the program on classmates of treated families.

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Parents are actively involved in their children's education at all ages, and school-based parental involvement programmes are in fashion in developed countries. Yet so far, economists have devoted little attention to determinants, levels and effects of parental involvement. This review is concerned with parental involvement for school-aged children. We comprehensively survey the economic literature on the topic, and selectively review theoretical and empirical studies outside economics.
Studies on the spontaneous involvement of parents can answer questions on why parents become involved. On the other hand, recent local and national reforms can improve our understanding of the extent to which children's success is influenced by what parents do. We use this distinction to organize the literature and underline the open questions in each field.

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