Financial Education and the Debt Behavior of the Young

Meta Brown, John Grigsby, Wilbert van der Klaauw, Jaya Wen and Basit Zafar

The Review of Financial Studies, 2016, vol. 29, issue 9, 2490-2522

Abstract: Young Americans are heavily reliant on debt and have clear financial literacy shortcomings. In this paper, we study the effects of exposure to financial training on debt outcomes in early adulthood among a large and representative sample of young Americans. Variation in exposure to financial training comes from statewide changes in high school graduation requirements. Using a flexible event study approach, we find that both mathematics and financial education, by and large, decrease reliance on nonstudent debt and improve repayment behavior. Economics training, on the other hand, increases both the likelihood of holding outstanding debt and the prevalence of repayment difficulties.Received July 9, 2014; accepted December 5, 2015 by Editor Stefan Nagel.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (95)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/rfs/hhw006 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Financial education and the debt behavior of the young (2013)
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:rfinst:v:29:y:2016:i:9:p:2490-2522.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Financial Studies is currently edited by Itay Goldstein

More articles in The Review of Financial Studies from Society for Financial Studies Oxford University Press, Journals Department, 2001 Evans Road, Cary, NC 27513 USA.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().