Topic Consumers

Financial Education in Schools: A Meta-Analysis of Experimental Studies

We study the literature on school financial education programs for children and youth via aquantitative meta-analysis of 37 (quasi-) experiments. We find that financial education treatmenthas, on average, a significant and sizeable impact on financial knowledge (+0.25 SD), similar toeducational interventions in other domains. Additionally, we document small but still significanteffects on financial ...

Financial Literacy and Financial Behavior: Evidence from the Emerging Asian Middle Class

This paper analyses financial literacy and financial behavior of middle class people living an urban Asian economy. Other than most papers on financial literacy that focus on people in developed countries, we surveyed people living Bangkok. Using standard financial literacy questions, we find that financial literacy levels are largely comparable to industrialized countries, but understanding of more ...

Signals Sell: Product Lines when Consumers Differ Both in Taste for Quality and Image Concern

This paper analyzes optimal product lines when consumers differ both in their taste for, quality and in their desire for social image. The market outcome features partial pooling and, product differentiation that is not driven by heterogeneous valuations for quality but by image, concerns. A typical monopoly outcome is a two-tier product line resembling a “masstige”, strategy as observed in luxury ...

Financial Literacy and Intra-Household Decision Making: Evidence from Rwanda

Despite considerable policy efforts, women continue to be underrepresented in positions of power and decision making. As an important aspect of women empowerment, we examine women’s participation in intrahousehold financial decision making and how this is affected by financial literacy. Using both OLS and IV regression analysis, we show that women with higher financial literacy are more involved in ...

Who Cares about Social Image?

This paper experimentally investigates how concerns for social approval relate to intrinsic motivations to purchase ethically. Participants state their willingness-to-pay for both a fair trade and a conventional chocolate bar in private or publicly. A standard model of social image predicts that all participants increase their fair trade premium when facing an audience. We find that the premium is ...

Fairness in Markets and Market Experiments

Whether pro-social preferences identified in economic laboratories 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 before and after the market experiment. We find that the willingness to buy at a higher price when higher wages are paid ...

Home Ownership and Monetary Policy Transmission

We present empirical evidence on the heterogeneity in monetary policy transmission across countries with different home ownership rates. We use household-level data together with shocks to the policy rate identified from high-frequency data. We find that housing tenure reacts more strongly to unexpected changes in the policy rate in Germany and Switzerland –the OECD countries with the lowest home ownership ...

Active Learning Fosters Financial Behavior: Experimental Evidence

We conduct a randomized field experiment to study the effects of two financial education interventions offered to small-scale retailers in Western Uganda. The treatments contrast “active learning” with “traditional lecturing” within standardized lesson-plans. We find that active learning has a positive and economically meaningful impact on savings and investment outcomes, in contrast to insignificant ...

Social Sustainability Labels: Promises and Reality in the Example of Fairtrade-Coffee

Fairtrade certification is intended to improve both the income and living conditions of producers, thereby creating more fairness in international trade. However, theoretical considerations and empirical studies show that this goal is only achieved to a limited extent, at least for coffee: Faitrade certification leads at best to small increases in income for coffee farmers. The results on the reduction ...

Firm Strategies and Consumer Behavior under Market-Based Sustainability Policies