Cash demand and financial literacy: A case study using Japanese survey data

Abstract

Understanding the statistical relationship between cash demand and financial literacy is important in addressing policy concerns in Japan because the government has tried to reduce cash demands for day-to-day transactions and hoarding. However, few scholars have investigated this point because the available statistics on household cash demand do not contain the standard proxy variable for financial literacy and they do not distinguish cash demands among various households for day-to-day transactions and hoarding. Findings from this research fill these gaps by first imputing the missing financial literacy variable from other surveys and then by comparing the distribution of cash holdings for the high, middle, and low levels of financial literacy groups. In comparing the distributions of cash holdings by the three groups, cash distributions were also compared after dropping the observations above higher percentiles, expecting that the cash demand for hoarding would show up in the higher percentile of the cash distributions. Thus, it was possible to examine cash demands for day-to-day transactions. A comparison of the distribution of the ratio of cash demands to total financial assets holdings plus cash demands (hereafter cash ratio) across three levels of financial literacy groups was also made. It was found that a person with a higher level of financial literacy tends to have a large amount of cash holdings, perhaps mainly for the sake of hoarding; however, the person also tends to have other kinds of financial assets and thus a lower cash ratio value. Taking those findings at face value, the promotion of financial literacy and cashless payments for day-to-day transactions would reduce the relatively small amount of cash demands for day-to-day transactions, but it would not necessarily reduce the amount of cash demands for hoarding.