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DR@W Forum - Eugenio Proto (Glasgow)
Using novel data from Luxembourg and comparative evidence from the UK and Australia, we document systematic under-reporting of children's socio-emotional difficulties by parents - particularly for daughters. A distinctive feature of our study is the joint measurement of first-order beliefs (how parents think their child feels) and second-order beliefs (how parents think their child reports feeling), allowing us to disentangle information frictions from evaluative bias. We find that second-order beliefs are systematically biased and that their precision is negatively correlated with the level of distress reported by the child. Parents with more accurate second-order beliefs also provide closer and unbiased first-order asvmaiments, suggesting that the negative difference between parent and child reports may arise from information frictions rather than deliberate minimization. Misperceptions are more common among highly educated and employed parents, and in parent-child pairs with divergent personality traits. Interestingly, parents with more accurate priors about general parental under-reporting tend to show greater divergence from their child's report in their rust-order beliefs. An information treatment improves beliefs among parents who already hold priors about systematic discrepancies between parent and child reports, demonstrating the malleability of parental beliefs to light-touch interventions. We also provide exploratory evidence that receiving accurate information can influence parents intentions to invest in their children's human capital.