Modern life offers nearly unbridled access to information; it is the harnessing of this information to guide decision-making that presents a challenge. We study how one individual may try to shape the way another person interprets objective information by proposing a causal explanation (or...

Attention utility is the hedonic pleasure or pain derived purely from paying attention to information. Using data on brokerage account logins by individual investors, we show that individuals devote disproportionate attention to already-known positive information about the performance of...

This article provides a concise narrative overview of the rapidly growing empirical literature on financial literacy and financial education. We first discuss stylized facts on the demographic correlates of financial literacy. We next cover the evidence on the effects of financial literacy on...

We conduct a randomized field experiment to study the effects of two financial education interventions offered to small-scale retailers in rural western Uganda. The treatments contrast “active learning” with traditional “lecturing” within standardized lesson-plans. After six months,...

We study the literature on school financial education programs for children and youth via a quantitative meta-analysis of 37 (quasi-) experiments. We find that financial education treatment has, on average, a significant and sizeable impact on financial knowledge (+0.25 SD), similar to...

We present the results of a randomized intervention in schools to study how teaching financial literacy affects risk and time preferences of adolescents. Following more than 600 adolescents, aged 16 years on average, over about half a year, we provide causal evidence that teaching financial...

We present the results of a randomized intervention to study how teaching financial literacy to 16-year old high-school students affects their behavior in risk and time preference tasks. Compared to two different control treatments, we find that teaching financial literacy makes subjects behave...

Modern life offers nearly unbridled access to information; it is the harnessing of this information to guide decision-making that presents a challenge. We study how one individual may try to shape the way another person interprets objective information by proposing a causal explanation (or...

We theoretically show that there is a fundamental disconnect between the disposition effect, i.e., investors’ tendency to sell winning assets too early and losing assets too late, and its common empirical measure, namely a positive difference between the proportion of gains and losses...

We show that the disposition effect–the tendency of investors to hold losers and sell winners–can be a source of overconfidence. We find experimental evidence that individuals update beliefs about their own investment ability based on realized gains and losses rather than the overall...