Financial literacy is a crucial skill for personal wealth management and economic well-being. Hence, it is important to evaluate the impact of interventions aimed at increasing financial literacy in the most vulnerable groups of the society. We conduct an impact evaluation of an intervention consisting in a two-hour lecture by university professors targeting the elderly population. We find that the intervention does not have a significant effect on literacy but has a significant effect on confidence. Our results highlight that short programs meant to increase financial literacy may have a severe drawback in favoring an increased confidence in one's own competence, not supported by an increased competence.
Financial stability is an important contributor to economic and psychological well-being. However, even before the economic upheaval of the Covid-19 pandemic, many households around the world had trouble making ends meet. The aim of this paper is twofold. First of all, we investigate financial literacy’s effect on householders’ ability to easily make ends meet. Then we focus on any financial literacy differential effects on female householders. We use subsamples from the Bank of Italy Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) and find that the data support the positive impact of higher financial literacy. Householders who correctly answer the Big Three questions-the standard assessment of financial literacy-are 8 percentage points more likely to make ends meet easily. When we apply a more comprehensive financial literacy indicator (21-score) based on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) methodology, the effect is even stronger (13.5 percentage points). Household financial stability is lower in southern regions of Italy and among women householders, but no findings support differential effects on women. Our estimates are robust to different models such as OLS, Probit and Ordered Probit and financial literacy specifications. Overall, our results underscore the economic importance of financial literacy in ensuring social and economic well-being.
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