Is It Still an Econ Course? The Effect of a Standardized Personal Finance Test on the Learning of Economics

Stephen Day (), Evelyn Nunes () and Bruno Sultanum
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Stephen Day: Center for Economic Education, VCU School of Business

No 2201, Working Papers from VCU School of Business, Department of Economics

Abstract: We study the implications of mixing economics and personal finance standards in a high school course. Using administrative, survey, and testing data on college students, we find that learning personal finance can help the learning of economics for some students and hurt it for others. We estimate that students who received more instruction in economics score almost 5 percentage points higher on our economics test. Furthermore, we estimate the effect of being assigned a certification test in per- sonal finance as a part of this course. Taking the personal finance certification test increases economics test scores by 2.5 percentage points for the average student, but this effect is not uniform across students. The certification test significantly increases the economics scores of students with low SAT scores, while decreasing the eco- nomics scores of those with high SAT scores. Our results emphasize the potentially idiosyncratic effects of mixing economics with personal finance.

Keywords: Personal Finance; Economics; W!se test; Learning Economics; Economic Education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 A21 I21 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2022-04
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Working Paper: Is It Still an Econ Course? The Effect of a Standardized Personal Finance Test on the Learning of Economics (2022)
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