Access to financial education courses makes a difference in high school students’ future financial lives. However, little data have been available to assess the access students have to these classes and what types of financial education are offered throughout the United States. We describe a novel dataset of over 19,000 hand-coded high school personal finance courses for over 7,400 high schools across the United States. These data cover the academic years from 2019–2020 to 2022–2023. The most common type of financial education offered is a semester-long course focused entirely on financial education, rather than, for example, a course on another topic that builds in a section on financial education. Schools that are in rural areas, schools with a higher percentage of Black students and schools that are geographically isolated from peers with high financial education requirements are less likely to require financial education courses for graduation.

This paper studies whether school-based financial education has spillover effects from children to parents. Leveraging data from a large-scale experiment with public high schools in Peru and credit bureau records on the parents of the youth targeted, this study measures the impact of providing personal finance lessons during secondary school on parental financial behavior. Financial education lessons in the school yield limited average spillover effects, but lead to sizable effects on parental financial behavior within disadvantaged households. Among parents from poorer households, the treatment reduces default probability by 26%, increases credit scores by 5%, and increases current debt levels by 40%. The treatment has stronger effects among the parents of daughters, who experience a significant 6.7% increase in their credit score and a 28% reduction in their loan portfolio in arrears. Among the parents of boys, most of the spillover effects are muted.

In the last decade, the increased complexity of, and levels of access to, financial products and services, together with rising household debt and the funding of an ageing population, have prompted the State to place increased focus on financial education, with the dual objectives of regulating to enhance market efficiency and mitigating social welfare issues attributed to poor financial decisions. Financial literacy is crucial for young adults as they embark on life events involving major expenditure and debt, particularly for university students who have already accrued a debt based on Higher Education contribution scheme liability and who are making labour market decisions. This paper investigates the determining factors of personal financial literacy levels among a sample of university students at different stages of study and across diverse study areas including business, education, arts, humanities and the sciences; with some interesting findings for policy makers. It also provides indicative evidence of students’ preferred method of learning more about personal finance to facilitate the effective design of personal financial literacy programs.

When making decisions that involve tradeoffs between the quality and timing of desirable outcomes, people consistently discount the value of future outcomes. A puzzling finding regarding such decisions is the extremely high rate at which people discount future monetary outcomes. Most economists would argue that decision-makers should turn down only rates of return that are lower than those available to them elsewhere. Yet the vast majority of studies find discount rates that are significantly higher than market interest rates (Frederick et al., 2002). Here we ask whether a lack of knowledge about the normative strategy can explain high discount rates. In an initial experiment, nearly half of subjects did not spontaneously cite elements of the normative strategy when asked how people should make intertemporal monetary decisions. In two follow-up experiments, after subjects read a “financial guide” detailing the normative strategy, discount rates declined by up to 85%, but were still higher than market interest rates. This decline persisted, though attenuated, for at least one month. In a final experiment, peer-generated advice influenced discount rates in a similar manner to “expert” advice, and arguments focusing on normative considerations were at least as effective as others. These studies show that part of the explanation for high discount rates is a lack of knowledge regarding the normative strategy, and they quantify how much discount rates are reduced in response to normative arguments. Given the high level of discounting that remains, however, there are other contributing factors to high discount rates that remain to be quantified.

Based on a sample of university students, we provide evidence that a small-scale training intervention has both a statistically and economically significant effect on subjective and objective assessments of financial knowledge. We also show that the intervention increases self-assessed more than actual financial knowledge. The intervention consists of measuring financial literacy before and after a small on-line course and is administered through an on-line platform.

There has been much concern about people not saving enough for retirement in the UK and how to encourage further saving. This has led to pension policy developments, including the introduction of auto-enrolment, a form of ‘soft’ compulsion, to ‘nudge’ people to save. Given that young working age cohorts have longest to contribute to pensions and have traditionally been least likely to save for retirement, it is important to investigate their attitudes and expectations in relation to pensions and the potential effects of auto-enrolment on their future retirement income. This study utilises the findings of thirty interviews with young people aged eighteen to thirty about their opportunities and attitudes towards pensions, and identifies a variety of factors which affect pension contributions, including knowledge and advice, trust and myopia. It then focuses explicitly on auto-enrolment before concluding that if auto-enrolment is to succeed, people need to be reassured beyond doubt that it ‘pays to save’.

Financial education is viewed by both policy makers and the public as an increasingly important tool for developing financially capable citizens in an era of increasing individual financial responsibility. This paper considers the recent history of school involvement in teaching financial education. It then draws on research undertaken in summer 2010 at two Birmingham primary schools to explore children's understandings of key financial issues. The paper concludes that there appears to be a groundswell of momentum behind making financial education a compulsory part of the National Curriculum, but, even if this happens, there will be challenges in delivering such education in practice. For example, the role of values in financial education makes it a contested subject and teachers will need training and support to deal with this. They will also need to be supported to deliver financial education in a way which recognises diversity and sensitivity issues in the classroom.

We compare levels of financial literacy between the general adult population of New Zealand, people of Māori ethnicity, and people of Ngāi Tahu, a Māori tribe that is providing financial education to its members. While the level of financial knowledge of Māori people is generally lower than for non-Māori (controlling for demographic and economic factors), there is little difference between the financial knowledge of the people of Ngāi Tahu and other New Zealanders. Moreover, we find that financial literacy is not significantly associated with planning for retirement. This could reflect the dominant role of New Zealand's universal public pension system in providing retirement income security.

We examine financial literacy in Germany using data from the SAVE survey. We find that knowledge of basic financial concepts is lacking among women, the less educated, and those living in East Germany. In particular, those with low education and low income in East Germany have low financial literacy compared to their West German counterparts. Interestingly, there is no gender disparity in financial knowledge in the East. In order to investigate the nexus of causality between financial literacy and retirement planning, we develop an instrumental variables strategy by making use of regional variation in the financial knowledge of peers. We find a positive impact of financial knowledge on retirement planning.

The level of financial literacy is not high in Japan. Although a majority of respondents were able to correctly answer a simple question about interest rates, more than half were not able to correctly answer a question about risk diversification. Many respondents stated they did not know the answer to the financial literacy questions, which might indicate that Japanese are very cautious and only answer when confident in their response. Women, the young, and those with lower incomes and lower educational attainment have the lowest levels of financial literacy, and financial literacy increases the probability of having a retirement savings plan.