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. Many of these experiments are published in top economics and finance journals. The evidence shows that financial education programs have, on average, positive causal treatment effects on financial knowledge ...
We conduct a randomized field experiment to study the effects of two financial education interventions offered to small-scale retailers in rural western Uganda. The treatments contrast “active learning” with traditional “lecturing” within standardized lesson-plans. After six months, active learning has a positive effect on savings and investment outcomes, in contrast to small or zero effects for lecturing. ...
Do financial education programs affect financial knowledge and behaviors? We examine this question using a meta-analysis that incorporates studies from the past decade, which saw a rapid increase in financial education research. When examining data from 76 financial education randomized experiments across 33 countries covering over 160,000 individuals, we find that financial education improves both ...
A number of studies show that there is a link between social comparison and high levels of household debt. However, the exact mechanisms behind this link are not yet well understood. In this paper, we disentangle two mechanisms by performing a lab experiment designed to study the effects of social image concerns and peer information on consumption choices financed through debt taking. We find that ...
Data is often at the core of digital products and services, especially when related to online advertising. This has made data protection and privacy a major policy concern. When surfing the web, consumers leave digital traces that can be used to build user profiles and infer preferences. We quantify the extent to which Facebook can track web behavior outside of their own platform. The network of engagement ...
Credit decisions play an important role for the economic wellbeing of households. However, the complexity of products and varying price information display makes it hard for consumers to navigate this field. Empirical evidence has important implications for consumer protection policies, as many people fail to make optimal choices for themselves and struggle to understand credit cost information. Presenting ...
Understanding the causes of the slowdown in aggregate productivity growth is key to maintaining the competitiveness of advanced economies and ensuring long-term economic prosperity. This paper is the first to provide evidence that investment in intangible capital, despite having a positive effect on productivity at the micro level, is a driver of the weak productivity performance at the aggregate level ...
Mobile money is an important instrument to improve the degree of financial inclusion, especially in developing countries. However, having a mobile money account does not imply that this account is actually used. In our sample, 86% of microentrepreneurs own a mobile money account, but only 49% actively use it – the resulting gap indicates unmet opportunities. We estimate that mobile money reaches up ...
Whether pro-social preferences identified in economic laboratory experiments survive in natural market contexts is an important and contested issue. We investigate how fairness in a laboratory experiment framed explicitly as a market exchange relates to preferences for fair trade products elicited before and at the end of the market experiment. We find that the willingness to buy at a higher price...