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In the last decade, developed and emerging economies have become increasingly aware of the importance of ensuring that their citizens are financially literate. Eighteen countries and economies, including 13 OECD countries, participated for the first time in 2012 on the financial literacy assessment of 15‐year‐old students. Financial literacy scores varied according to the participating countries, and they were determined by factors related to the teaching‐learning process, especially those related to the delivery of financial education in schools. This paper assesses the effectiveness of the provision of financial education in the school curriculum across all the countries that participated in PISA 2012—data from 2015 did not allow such analysis. We measured the direct effect of different ways of financial education delivery on students' financial literacy scores, after controlling for math and reading performance, and individual characteristics of students and their schools. The majority of the countries have introduced financial education topics in the curriculum somehow. But only in the Flemish Community of Belgium, the United States, and Latvia—and to a lesser extent in Australia, Estonia, France, Israel, Poland, Spain, the Czech Republic, the Russian Federation, and the Slovak Republic—the way how financial education (FE) is delivered is positively correlated with students' financial literacy scores: FE taught as part of business or economics courses in Belgium, FE taught as part of a cross‐curricular subject in the U.S., and FE taught as part of mathematics in Latvia. Our main findings pose fundamental challenges for educational policy regarding school‐based FE. The first is to decide at what age (grade) interventions should be introduced into the education system so that students are not only financially literate but also financially competent. The second is to devise instructional approaches that more effectively lead young people to put pertinent financial knowledge into practice and to do so correctly when they make financial decisions.

individuals' social preferences, this finding indicates that most people display inequality-averse preferences. We explore the relationship between self-reports on inequality aversion and LS in a citywide representative survey/experiment conducted in Spain. If self-reported well-being can be used to infer people's social preferences, LS should correlate negatively with both "envy" and "compassion" scores (i.e., how much one suffers from disadvantageous and advantageous inequality, respectively). We find that LS relates negatively to envy but positively to compassion, which would imply that suffering from observing poorer others, paradoxically, increases well-being. Using an incentivized Dictator Game as a measure of generous behavior, we reject the hypothesis that the positive link between compassion and LS is actually driven by generosity. We discuss how these findings could indicate that the way LS is used to assess social preferences in the population should be revised.