Abstract
This article reports the results of a controlled field experiment designed to estimate the short‐term effects of a 45‐minute financial education program on the financial literacy and savings behavior of children in Dutch primary schools. Among fifth and sixth graders, the program led to a pre‐ to posttest improvement in financial literacy on almost one of eight questions, with about one‐third of the increase in correctness attributable to the program. It also raised the probability of willingness to save by 4 percentage points. Nonetheless, whereas the program appears effective in respect to questions that explicitly address program content, its significant effects on financial literacy seem primarily driven by the results for girls, although we cannot reject homogeneous treatment effects with respect to gender.
Highlights
For instance, that financial literacy is more related to motivation to acquire than to the financial education goal of increased knowledge on specific financial topics (Caskey 2006)
Such a consideration is especially important given that the cognitive development level of most primary school children enables only short-term measurements of the effect of concrete examples (Scheinholtz, Holden, and Kalish 2012)
That is decided by the European Central Bank
Summary
Using the pretest sample, we test for endogenous selection into either the treatment or control group or into the panel, reporting these (and all subsequent results) at a 5% level of significance. The results for Equation (1), estimated based only on pretest responses, provide further evidence for the gender gap documented for (Dutch). The largest gender gap is for the financial numeracy question on which offer to choose when purchasing balls for a sports club (Q8). It should be noted, that any similar association between financial literacy and age should be interpreted cautiously because this present study controls for grade, without which (in unreported analyses), older children did better on average than younger children. Being interested in money is associated with fewer correct responses overall, no significant associations are observable for individual questions
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