This paper asks whether personal financial management education is an effective mechanism for helping lower-income households accumulate financial assets and improve credit histories. The paper argues that the best existing studies of the effectiveness of financial literacy initiatives suggest that such initiatives might help lower-income households build savings and improve credit records, but the results are only suggestive due to the limitations of the studies. The paper concludes that a high research priority should be to gathering more robust evidence on whether teaching personal financial management skills to lower-income households can be an effective means to improve their financial situations.
The author of this article examines the empirical support for the propositions that bank branches are significantly underrepresented in low-income and minority urban communities and that the problem has worsened in recent years. He tests these propositions with data on bank branch locations from 1970 through 1989 in five cities. The data from two of the cities are consistent with the propositions, but the patterns in the data from the other three cities are either inconsistent or mixed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.