A, B, or C? Question Format and the Gender Gap in Financial Literacy

Maddalena Davoli ()

No 206, Economics of Education Working Paper Series from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW)

Abstract: Financial literacy surveys, composed primarily of multiple-choice questions, consistently show women having lower financial knowledge than men. The education science literature finds that gender bias is inherent in multiple-choice testing. Using data from PISA 2015, this paper investigates the differential gender effect of question formats on students' financial literacy assessments. This paper, employing data from PISA 2015, analyzes the differential gender effect of question formats on students' financial literacy assessment. Having answers to both multiple-choice and open-response questions for each student, we employ a panel specification and use within-student variation while controlling for students' fixed characteristics. Findings show female students performing worse when answering multiple-choice questions with no observable difference for the open-response format. Robustness tests indicate that the question characteristics underlying the multiple-choice format partly drive the results. I show how school policies aimed at training students for the multiple-choice format may help close the gender gap.

Keywords: gender gaps; financial literacy; PISA; question format; within-student estimate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 G53 I21 I24 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2023-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-fle, nep-gen and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.business.uzh.ch/RePEc/iso/leadinghouse/0206_lhwpaper.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iso:educat:0206

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics of Education Working Paper Series from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sara Brunner ().