The OECD recommends its member countries implement national strategies for financial education. Many other countries, such as China and India, also have such strategies, whereas Germany does not. The strongest reason for rejecting such a strategy is the supposition that financial education interventions are ineffective. Using all available randomized experimental studies, this study investigates and ...
This research studies the stylized fact of a “gender gap” in that women tend to have lower financial literacy than men. Our data which samples middle-class people from Bangkok does not show a gender gap for those with at least minimum wage earnings. This result is not explained by men’s low financial literacy, nor by women’s high income and good education. Rather, country characteristics may influence ...
Mobile money is an innovation that allows financial transactions to be performed via a cell phone. Even in poor regions of Africa, almost everyone has a cell phone; therefore, mobile money could both contribute to the continent’s economic growth and ensure that no Africans are excluded from access to financial services. However, DIW Berlin data from Uganda show that mobile money is actually used less ...
We study the rapidly growing literature on the causal effects of financial education programs in a meta-analysis of 76 randomized experiments with a total sample size of over 160,000 individuals. The evidence shows that financial education programs have, on average, positive causal treatment effects on financial knowledge and downstream financial behaviors. Treatment effects are economically meaningful ...
We employ a psychometrically validated performance test to study economic competence among representative sample of 1,687 early secondary school students in Southwest Germany. The rich dataset allows us to study variation in economic competence across school types and observable student characteristics. Our results show that economic competence is significantly lower among female students, migrants, ...
We study the role of financial literacy for inter-temporal decision-making using an adapted version of the Convex Time Budget Protocol (Andreoni and Sprenger 2012). While we find no evidence of dynamically inconsistent preferences in the aggregate, we document substantial heterogeneity in choice-patterns and estimated parameters at the individual-level: We find that subjects with higher levels of financial ...
About two billion people in the world do not own a financial account and there are many more who use financial services only occasionally. In the past, initiatives which address these problems of financial exclusion focused on the supply side of financial markets, in particular by increasing the branch network of banks and by offering cheap bank products. While this had the desired effect, recent ...
We study the literature on school financial education programs for children and youth via a quantitative meta-analysis of 37 (quasi-) experiments. We find that financial education treatments have, on average, sizeable impacts on financial knowledge (+0.33 SD), similar to educational interventions in other domains. Additionally, we document smaller effects on financial behaviors among students (+0.07 ...
This RCT examines the effect of a new style finance training during which participants are given personalized feedback on their financial business outcomes in addition to a “rules-of-thumb” training approach. We compare this to the effects of a “rules-of-thumb” training by itself and to a control group. Targeting about 500 small and micro entrepreneurs in Kampala, Uganda, we find that the personalized ...
This paper examines whether biased income expectations due to overconfidence lead to higher levels of debt-taking. In a lab experiment, participants can purchase goods by borrowing against their future income. We exogenously manipulate income expectations by letting income depend on relative performance in hard and easy quiz tasks. We successfully generate biased income expectations and show that participants ...