We employ a psychometrically validated performance test to study economic competence among a large and representative sample of early secondary school students in Southwest Germany. The rich dataset allows us to study variation in economic competence across school types and observable student characteristics. Our results show that economic competence is significantly lower among female students, migrants, students with parents of low socioeconomic status and those who do not attend the highest track school type. Additionally, quantile regression analyses suggest that the gender gap increases along the distribution of economic competence and that effects of parents with high socioeconomic status are more pronounced above the median of the competence distribution. Our analysis sets the stage for a long-term study of economic competence among secondary school students and the impact of a recent curriculum reform introducing mandatory economic education.

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Various studies have examined how the study of economics affects students' views on economic phenomena, yet there is little evidence regarding its impact on teenagers. We study the effect of a recent curriculum reform introducing mandatory economic education on teenagers' attitudes towards economics in Southwest Germany. Our findings reveal that students affected by the reform show, on average, more interest in economics, see money as more important and expect more social responsibility from companies. Conversely, we don't observe differences in attitudes towards competition. Regarding socio-economic characteristics, our data reveal strong gender differences already before adulthood.

Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence.

We study the role of cognitive ability and financial literacy for inter-temporal decision-making using an adapted version of the Convex Time Budget Protocol. We document substantial heterogeneity in choice-patterns and estimated parameters at the individual-level: We find that subjects with higher cognitive ability and domain specific-knowledge are more likely to make patient inter-temporal choices, to allocate the entire budget to a single payment-date, and to allocate the entire budget to corner choices as interest rates increase. At the same time, domain specific knowledge is uncorrelated with choice consistency and estimated individual error parameters, suggesting these results are not driven by a reduction in random noise among high ability respondents. These results serve as suggestive evidence for inter-temporal arbitrage among high ability respondents, thereby revealing a potential confound in time-preference elicitation tasks relying on time-dated monetary rewards.

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We study the impact of a recent curriculum reform introducing mandatory economic education in higher-track secondary schools in Southwest Germany. The curriculum reform provides the opportunity to leverage the exogenous variation in exposure to economic education relative to the previous cohort not affected by the reform. One year after exposure to the mandate, we observe positive treatment effects on test scores measuring cognitive elements of economic competence only for students with high test scores at baseline. Two years after exposure to the mandate, we find positive treatment effects on test scores across the entire distribution, as well as socio-emotional skills relevant to financial decision making while we do not observe effects on self-reported financial behaviors. At the same time, we find no changes in social preferences and normative attitudes that could give rise to concerns of indoctrination effects regarding students' views on profit maximization and the market mechanism.