Can You Help Someone Become Financially Capable?: A Meta-Analysis of the Literature

By Margaret J. Miller, Julia Reichelstein, C. Salas, Bilal Zia. 2015

314 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper presents a systematic and comprehensive meta-analysis of the literature on financial education interventions. The analysis focuses on financial education studies designed to strengthen the financial knowledge and behaviors of consumers. The analysis identifies 188 papers and articles that present impact results of interventions designed to increase consumers' financial knowledge (financial literacy) or skills, attitudes, and behaviors (financial capability). These papers are diverse across a number of dimensions, including objectives of the program intervention, expected outcomes, intensity and duration of the intervention, delivery channel used, and type of population targeted. However, there are a few key outcome indicators where a subset of papers are comparable, including those that address savings behavior, defaults on loans, and financial skills, such as record keeping. The results from the meta analysis indicate that financial literacy and capability interventions can have a positive impact in some areas (increasing savings and promoting financial skills such as record keeping) but not in others (credit default).

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/73783c56627df079af5272f7e04351e7dcd3df88

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Citations in the corpus

Financial education in schools: A meta-analysis of experimental studies (2020, methodology): “Additionally, as our review of the larger literature on financial education included a screening of references from previous meta-analyses (Fernandes et al., 2014; Miller et al., 2015) as well as narrative reviews (Fox et al.”
A review of financial-literacy education programs for children and adolescents (2018, methodology): “…we searched the contents of the last five volumes of the Journal of Economic Education and the International Review of Economic Education, and searched the reference lists in McCormick (2009), Miller et al. (2014), and Totenhagen et al. (2015) for relevant studies (i.e. the snowball method).”
Financial Education Affects Financial Knowledge and Downstream Behaviors (2020, unknown): “This result is 13 We also check the robustness of results when excluding any papers of the authors of this meta-analysis. et al. (2015), and Kaiser and Menkhoff (2017), and extends to the larger set of RCTs.”