Technology, Parenting, and the Rich-Poor Educational Gap: A Digital Footprint Approach

We study how online teaching technology affects the educational gap between rich and poor children. By exploiting an exogenous switch from in-person to online teaching ordered by local governments in China’s Guangdong Province in 2020-2021, we propose a digital footprint approach based on smartphone usage to construct key variables that are otherwise hard to measure, including identifying families with children who graduate from primary school, the type of schools they go to, and family wealth status. Across the 21 cities in our sample, we find that the relative advantage of children from better-to-do families rises with the duration of online teaching. Furthermore, our digital footprint approach suggests that parental behavior, including more time spent at home, is an important contributor to this widening gap in educational outcomes.