Subjective Belief Distributions and the Characterization of Economic Literacy

Amalia Di Girolamo, Glenn Harrison, Morten Lau and J. Todd Swarthout ()
Additional contact information
J. Todd Swarthout: Georgia State University

No 9856, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We characterize the literacy of an individual in a domain by their elicited subjective belief distribution over the possible responses to a question posed in that domain. By eliciting the distribution, rather than just the answers to true/false or multiple choice questions, we can directly measure the confidence that an individual has about their knowledge of some fact. We consider literacy across several financial and economic domains. We find considerable demographic heterogeneity in the degree of literacy. We also measure the degree of consistency within a sample about their knowledge, even when that knowledge is imperfect.

Keywords: subjective beliefs; economic literacy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 D03 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2016-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe and nep-hpe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp9856.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Subjective belief distributions and the characterization of economic literacy (2015)
Working Paper: Subjective Belief Distributions and the Characterization of Economic Literacy (2015)
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:iza:izadps:dp9856

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().