The Impact of Financial Education for Youth

Veronica Frisancho

No 9809, IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank

Abstract: This paper evaluates if the excitement about school-based financial education is warranted. First, relying on recent experimental evidence, the paper takes stock of the impact of financial education programs aimed at reaching children and youth. Second, it complements existing studies by focusing on the potentially negative unintended effects of these programs. Relying on data from a large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) in Peru, this paper investigates whether financial education programs have spillover effects on academic outcomes or if they widen initial inequalities due to heterogeneous treatment impacts. While delivery models that incorporate a mandatory course requirement yield large and robust impacts on financial literacy, voluntary after school programs yield meager effects. These gains do not come at the cost of pervasive effects on the probability to pass a grade. Moreover, the impact of school-based financial education seems to be very inclusive, as treatment effects tend to be uniform across different sub-samples.

Keywords: Financial education; Youth; Randomized controlled trials; Treatment effects; Heterogeneous impacts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 J24 O16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english ... ion_for_Youth_en.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The impact of financial education for youth (2020)
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:idb:brikps:9809

DOI: 10.18235/0001791

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IDB Publications (Working Papers) from Inter-American Development Bank Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Felipe Herrera Library ().