SaveWise: The impact of a real-life financial education program for ninth grade students in the Netherlands

Aisa Amagir, Henriëtte Maassen van den Brink, Wim Groot and Arie Wilschut

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, 2022, vol. 33, issue C

Abstract: This experimental study with a pre-post and follow-up design evaluates the financial education program “SaveWise” for ninth grade students in the Netherlands (n=713). SaveWise adopts a holistic approach, emphasizing action rather than mere cognition. Benefitting from explicit instruction embedded in real-life contexts, students in the program set a personal savings goal and are coached on how to achieve it. The short-term treatment results indicated that SaveWise expanded the students’ level of financial knowledge; encouraged their intentions to save more, spend less and earn an income; and broadly improved their financial and savings behavior. The program demonstrated that it could serve as an effective and low-cost method to enhance the financial literacy of pre-vocational students, a financially vulnerable group. Although long-term effects were expressed only through financial socialization, this study offers evidence linking curricula to increased knowledge and improved behavior for a specific sample of students.

Keywords: Financial education; Financial literacy; Financial knowledge; Attitudes towards money; Financial behavior; Savings behavior; Experiment; Adolescents (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A21 D14 G53 I21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:beexfi:v:33:y:2022:i:c:s2214635021001490

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbef.2021.100605

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