In half of the schools the investment in the group account was explained by using an example relating to the education sector and in the other half it was explained by using an example relating to farming.<sup>22</sup>

# **4 A first look at the data**

# **4.1 Parent characteristics**

Table 1 summarizes the characteristics of the 1800 parents randomly selected to participate in the 2009 School Stakeholder Survey and the characteristics of the Albanians selected to participate in the 2008 Albanian Living Standards Measurement Survey.<sup>23</sup> Demographics such as years of schooling (for the LSMS data we took the years of education of the adult population) and age are strikingly similar across the two samples, with educational attainment averaging approximately 11 years and an average age of 40 years in the school-level survey and 44 in the household survey. While the LSMS provides a measure of yearly household income, the School Stakeholder Survey does not. Therefore, following Filmer and Pritchett (2001), we constructed an index of household socio-economic status based on parents‟ answers to 14 questions about ownership of consumer durables, such as washing machines, refrigerators, ovens, cars, and mobile phones. We conducted a principal factor analysis on the answers to the 14 questions;<sup>24</sup> Table 1 reports the resulting first factor, which we refer to as a household wealth indicator.

The second panel of Table 1 reports a number of survey-based measures of social capital. With the exception of membership in formal organizations and generalized trust, our measures of social capital are comparable to those obtained by the 2008 LSMS. Note that only 13% of the parents in our sample think that “most people could be trusted”, and on average, only 6% of the surveyed parents are relatives or close friends of each other, although there seems to be quite a large variation in social ties in the different schools. The third panel of Table 2 shows that 76% of the parents help with homework at least once a week (higher than the 54% generated by the LSMS data), and on average parents had 4 meetings with the head teacher in the previous semester, or 8 meetings in a year, as shown by the LSMS data.

> 22 See the instructions in Appendix for a full description of the examples employed in both versions of the public goods experiment. As we discuss in the next section, the specific example used does not seem to affect the correlation between individuals‟ behavior in the public goods game and their voting behavior. 23 Table A1 in Appendix reports the specific questions used in the two surveys to generate measures of social capital and of parental involvement with their children‟s education. 24 Principal factor analysis is a technique used to summarize information contained in a large number of correlated variables into a smaller number of mutually uncorrelated components. The first factor or component is the linear index of all the observed variables that captures the most common variation among them. The first factor or component in our analysis captures 53% of the common variation among the 14 asset variables. One of the assets included in the wealth index is the ownership of a television, which is likely to be particularly important to convey information about the national elections; we found that 98% of the parents own one.

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