Financial literacy education is one of lifelong assets that every individual needs to function and fit well in modern-day society. It provides the financially savvy better decision making, best investment alternatives and family wellbeing. Unfortunately, consumers appear less active and less...

We use the German re-unification as a natural experiment to understand drivers of financial literacy accumulation. With the transformation from a planned to a market-based economy in 1990, the incentives to invest in financial literacy were changed exogenously for East Germans and remained the...

More than three-quarters of U.S. households bear consumer debt, yet we have little understanding of the relationship between financial education and the debt behavior of U.S. consumers. In this paper, we study the effects of exposure to financial training on debt outcomes in early adulthood....

We analyze whether the frequent use of credit lines is rational or influenced by behavioral traits of households. We consider the special case of Germany where credit lines on current accounts are available to 80% of the population. We document that the excessive usage of costly credit lines is...

Professional advice can be perceived as a means to tackleshortcomings in the objectively measuredfinancial literacy ofconsumers. However, most studies suggest that lessfinanciallyliterate individuals are less likely to seek experts'financial advice.At the same time, it has been shown...

Since the financial crisis financial literacy has attracted growing interest among researchers and policy makers, as there is international empirical evidence that financial literacy is poor among both adults and students. In Germany we have almost no empirical evidence on financial literacy,...

Government leaders around the world are designing national strategies to improve financial inclusion for populations traditionally excluded from the financial markets. Financial literacy is a key tool being used to bring economically vulnerable populations into the financial mainstream. Data...

We exploit the natural experiment of the 2005 income tax reform in Germany to study the effects of tax incentives on consumer behavior in life insurance markets. Our empirical analysis of sociodemographic, economic, and psychological household characteristics elicited in the German SAVE study...

The tendency to underestimate the future value of a variable growing at a constant rate, an example of exponential growth bias, has been linked to household financial decision making. We show that exponential growth bias and standard measures of financial literacy are negatively correlated in a...