Financial Education Affects Financial Knowledge and Downstream Behaviors

By Tim Kaiser, Anna Lusardi, Lukas Menkhoff, Carly Urban. Social Science Research Network, 2020

478 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract 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 and downstream financial behaviors. Treatment effects are economically meaningful in size, similar to those realized by educational interventions in other domains, and robust to accounting for publication bias in the literature. We also discuss the cost-effectiveness of financial education interventions.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2cca7b652ffe78025e75dc2e8ed5a096c61a2089

Citations in the corpus

• Fearless Woman: Financial Literacy and Stock Market Participation (2021, unknown): “…stocks with modest stakes (of about $50) for about four weeks increases women’s financial literacy, confidence, and subsequent stock 26 For recent evidence on the effectiveness of financial education, see Frisancho (2020), Lührmann et al. (2018), and Kaiser et al. (2020). market participation.”