Can You Help Someone Become Financially Capable? A Meta-Analysis of the Literature

Abstract

This paper presents a systematic and comprehensive meta-analysis of the literature on financial education interventions that focuses on financial education studies designed to strengthen the financial knowledge and behaviors of consumers. The analysis identifies 188 papers and articles that present impact results of interventions designed to increase consumers' financial knowledge (financial literacy) or skills, attitudes, and behaviors (financial capability). These papers are diverse across a number of dimensions, including objectives of the program intervention, expected outcomes, intensity and duration of the intervention, delivery channel used, and type of population targeted. However, there are a few key outcome indicators where a subset of papers are comparable, including those that address savings behavior, defaults on loans, and financial skills such as record keeping. The results from the meta-analysis indicate that financial literacy and capability interventions can have a positive impact in some areas (e.g., increasing savings) but not in others (e.g., reducing loan defaults). Financial education, financial literacy, meta Analysis.

How Does Consumers' Financial Vulnerability Relate to Positive and Negative Financial Outcomes? The Mediating Role of Individual Psychological Characteristics

“…Our results thus highlight PSO as a value‐based component that could supplement and enhance education initiatives or advice regarding a range of differently poised financial behaviors such as savings behavior or managing debt. It may be the case that the relatively short‐lived and minor effects of information‐ or knowledge‐based interventions (Fernandes, Lynch, and Netemeyer , Miller et al ) could at least in part be due to such traditional approaches failing to instill in consumers a longer‐term sense of value to engage in these behaviors. The fact that financial difficulty has negative impacts on temporal and attentional psychological factors (Haushofer and Fehr ; Mullainathan and Shafir ) as well as goal‐directed behavior (Schwabe and Wolf ) may offer some explanation as to PSO's value as a mediating influence.…”

The Effects of Financial Education: Evidence from Finnish Lower Secondary Schools

“…). There is a paucity of research evaluating the impact of financial education in schools – particularly in levels below secondary school – and many of the studies that do address this topic employ small samples and sometimes no control groups (Collins and Odders‐White, ; Miller et al ., ).…”

“…Few studies evaluate issues related to quality of instruction, such as teaching methods and teacher interests, although there is a general consensus that the way education is delivered can make a substantial difference for learning (Heinberg et al 2014). There is a paucity of research evaluating the impact of financial education in schoolsparticularly in levels below secondary schooland many of the studies that do address this topic employ small samples and sometimes no control groups Miller et al, 2015).…”

“…Such replication designs can improve (or help confirm) the external validity of datasets (Batty et al (2015) present another example of such replication). Third, many previous studies on financial education have been from the United States or from developing countries, and there are few studies from Europe (Miller et al, 2015). Finally, there are only few studies in this field at the pre-high school level .…”

Dual Credit Markets and Household Usage to Finance: Evidence from a Representative Chinese Household Survey

“… A growing literature underscores the importance of financial and economic knowledge on financial access and financial decisions (see Fernandes, Lynch and Netemeyer, and Miller et al ., for overviews). We therefore constructed proxies for financial/economic literacy based on responses to the CHFS on questions about financial decision making and financial education.…”