Financial Literacy, Information, and Demand Elasticity: Survey and Experimental Evidence from Mexico

Justine Hastings and Lydia Tejeda-Ashton

No 14538, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We use responses to a survey and experiment with participants in Mexico's privatized social security system to examine how financial literacy impacts workers' choice behavior and how simplifying information on management fees may increase measures of price elasticity sensitivity among the financially illiterate. We find that by presenting fees in pesos instead of annual percentage rates, financially illiterate workers focus much more on fees when choosing between investment funds, selecting funds with lower average fees in hypothetical choice settings. Even though changes in information have small impacts on fees of the selected fund, holding fees constant, we show that changes in choice behavior imply a substantial increase in price sensitivity. Hence, the way in which information is presented to workers can have a substantial impact on optimal fees that firms can charge in the marketplace.

JEL-codes: H0 H55 L10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-exp and nep-lab
Note: AG IO PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (107)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14538.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:nbr:nberwo:14538

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14538

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().