Financial literacy among Mexican high school teenagers

Eva Arceo-Gomez and Alejandro Villagomez

International Review of Economics Education, 2017, vol. 24, issue C, 1-17

Abstract: Financial literacy has become an increasingly important ability in today’s complex world. Young people are among the least financially literate demographic groups. In this paper we present the results of a financial literacy survey conducted among high school students in Mexico City, the first effort to measure financial literacy among teenagers in Mexico. The survey is based upon the instruments developed by OECD and Lusardi and Mitchell’s approach. Our results show low levels of financial literacy: 60% of the students surveyed understood the concept of inflation, 34.1% correctly answered the question about risk diversification, and only 31.7% correctly answered the question about compound interest. The OECD questions showed that less than 1 in 5 students understands basic financial concepts, around 57% get high scores on financial behavior, and about 70% have positive financial attitudes. We did not find generalized gender differences, though women score a bit higher on the OECD measure mostly due to a better financial behavior. We also did not find differences between private and public schools, or by household income.

Keywords: Financial literacy; Financial behavior; Financial attitudes; Savings; Teenagers; Mexico (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D14 D91 O54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S147738801530205X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ireced:v:24:y:2017:i:c:p:1-17

DOI: 10.1016/j.iree.2016.10.001

Access Statistics for this article

International Review of Economics Education is currently edited by Guest, Ross

More articles in International Review of Economics Education from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).