Precautionary Savings, Retirement Planning and Misperceptions of Financial Literacy

Anders Anderson, Forest Baker and David Robinson

No 21356, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We measure financial literacy among LinkedIn members, complementing standard questions with additional questions that allow us to gauge self-perceptions of financial literacy. Average financial literacy is surprisingly low given the demographics of our sample: fewer than two-thirds of CFOs, CEOs, and COOs complete the test correctly. Financial literacy, precautionary savings and retirement planning are positively correlated, but this is mostly driven by perceived, not actual, literacy: controlling for self-perceptions, actual literacy has low predictive power. Perceptions drive decision-making among low-literacy respondents and are associated with mistaken beliefs about financial products and less willingness to accept financial advice.

JEL-codes: G02 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-07
Note: CF
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published as Anders Anderson & Forest Baker & David T. Robinson, 2017. "Precautionary savings, retirement planning and misperceptions of financial literacy," Journal of Financial Economics, .

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21356.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Precautionary savings, retirement planning and misperceptions of financial literacy (2017)
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:21356

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21356

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 ().