 How Much Can Financial Literacy Help?Luigi Guiso and Eliana Viviano No 9693, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research Abstract: We merge survey data on a sample of individual investors containing test-based measures of financial literacy with administrative records on their assets holding and trades before, during and after the financial crisis of September 2008. This dataset allows us to design three tests of the benefits of financial literacy by comparing the decisions actually taken by individuals with a dominated alternative. We find that high-literacy investors are better at timing the market, since conditional on exiting the stock market they are more likely to exit before rather than after the crash following the collapse of Lehman Brothers. High-literacy investors are also more likely to trade according to the prescriptions of normative models and to detect intermediaries? potential conflicts of interest. However, though statistically significant these effects are economically small. In fact, far too many investors, even among those with high literacy, tend to choose the dominated alternative along all dimensions of choice examined. This suggests that literacy may be a poor edge against financial mistakes. Keywords: Financial literacy; Household finance; Individual investors (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:9693 Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from Access Statistics for this paper More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK. |
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