Much policy attention has been placed on enhancing individuals' financial knowledge and literacy, chiefly through financial education programs. However, managing one's personal finances takes more than financial knowledge and literacy: an individual also needs a sense of self-assuredness, or 'self-belief', in their own capabilities. This personal attribute is known within the psychology literature as 'self-efficacy'. This paper examines the significance of an individual's financial self-efficacy in explaining their personal finance behaviour, through the application of a psychometric instrument. Using a 2013 survey of Australian women, financial self-efficacy emerges as one of the strongest predictors of the type and number of financial products that a woman holds. Specifically, our analysis reveals that women with higher financial self-efficacy -that it, with greater self-assuredness in their financial management capacities -are more likely to hold investment and savings products, and less 2 likely to hold debt-related products. Even alongside other important factors -such as education, financial risk preferences, age and household income -the explanatory power of financial self-efficacy is found to be significant at the 1% critical level. Moreover, the significance of financial self-efficacy is independently identified from that of financial literacy factors, which bears important implications for the development of policies aiming to improve financial outcomes.

We provide a detailed statistical investigation into the economic and demographic factors that determine sporting participation in England. Using data from the 1997 health survey of England we ®t random-effects probit models that take into account unobservable household preferences for sporting activities, as well as the economic and demographic characteristics of respondents. Our main results from the multivariate analysis are that sporting participation is positively related to household income, the educated participate in sports to a greater extent than the uneducated, there is no evidence of regional differentials in sporting participation and household preferences play an important role in the decision to participate in sports.

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This paper estimates the long‐ and short‐run elasticities for Lotto. It is particularly concerned with the dynamic response to price variations since, for some goods, this has sometimes been used to infer the presence of addiction. The price elasticity is identified through variation in the expected value of a Lotto ticket induced by rollovers whose high frequency results in surprisingly high variation in the expected value of holding a ticket. Unit root tests are applied to the series in order to identify their time series properties and to avoid a spurious regression problem. The series are found to be stationary. We apply instrumental variables to account for the endogeneity which arises due to correlation between the expected value and the dependent sales variable. The estimated long‐run elasticity exceeds the short‐run elasticity and this supports the hypothesis that there is an element of addictive behaviour in sales. The Lottery is regulated and the regulator’s objective is to maximize sales. Our estimated long‐run price elasticity of demand is inconsistent with revenue maximization and we find that greater revenue for the ‘good causes’ could be raised from the game if a smaller proportion of sales revenue were allocated to them.