Five steps to planning success: experimental evidence from US households

Aileen Heinberg, Angela Hung, Arie Kapteyn, Annamaria Lusardi (), Anya Samek and Joanne Yoong ()

Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 2014, vol. 30, issue 4, 697-724

Abstract: While financial knowledge has been linked to improved financial behaviour, there is little consensus on the value of financial education, in part because rigorous evaluation of various programmes has yielded mixed results. However, given the heterogeneity of financial education programmes in the literature, focusing on ‘generic’ financial education can be inappropriate and even misleading. Lusardi (2009) and others argue that pedagogy and delivery matter significantly. In this paper, we design and field a low-cost, easily-replicable financial education programme called ‘Five Steps’, covering five basic financial planning concepts that relate to retirement. We conduct a field experiment to evaluate the overall impact of Five Steps on a probability sample of the American population. In different treatment arms, we quantify the relative impact of delivering the programme through video and narrative formats. Our results show that short videos and narratives (each takes about 3 minutes) have sizeable short-run effects on objective measures of respondent knowledge. Moreover, keeping informational content relatively constant, format has significant effects on other psychological levers of behavioural change: effects on self-efficacy are significantly higher when videos are used, which ultimately influences knowledge acquisition. Follow-up tests of respondents’ knowledge approximately 8 months after the interventions suggest that between one-quarter and one-third of the knowledge gain and about one-fifth of the self-efficacy gain persist. Thus, this simple programme has effects both in the short run and medium run.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oxrep/gru036 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Five Steps to Planning Success. Experimental Evidence from U.S. Households (2014)
Working Paper: Five Steps to Planning Success. Experimental Evidence from U.S. Households (2014)
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:oup:oxford:v:30:y:2014:i:4:p:697-724.

Access Statistics for this article

Oxford Review of Economic Policy is currently edited by Christopher Adam

More articles in Oxford Review of Economic Policy from Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().