As the financial landscape for consumers becomes increasingly complex, the importance of facilitating financial capability increases. Although most financial decisions are made by adults, there is a burgeoning interest in providing financial education to children in the hope that they will develop the skills needed to successfully manage their finances in adulthood. This study uses an experimental design to evaluate a set of standardized financial education lessons delivered to fourth and fifth graders in two different school districts. We find that even a relatively brief program results in knowledge gains that persist one year later. While measuring financial behaviors in this age group is challenging, students exposed to financial education have more positive attitudes about personal finance and appear more likely to save. These results show that younger students can learn financial topics and that learning is associated with improved attitudes and behaviors which, if sustained, may result in increased financial capability later in life.

Hospitals in the United States maintain chargemasters that contain the official list prices for all billable services. The prices vary widely across hospitals and are more than three times what hospitals are paid for treating a patient, on average. From this it is tempting to conclude that list prices are a strange, yet ultimately inconsequential, quirk of US health care. However, using both state and national data sets covering the period 2002-14, we found considerable evidence suggesting that list prices reflect hospitals' strategic behavior and have meaningful effects on payments made by and on behalf of patients. Specifically, we found that list prices varied predominantly across hospitals and within markets, were well predicted by observable hospital characteristics, and were positively related to prices actually paid by patients and their insurers. Moreover, analyses of data before and after the implementation of California's Hospital Fair Pricing Act suggest that high list prices causally increased payments from the uninsured. However, list prices had at most a limited relationship with care quality.

This paper uses detailed high-frequency regulatory data to evaluate whether trading increases or decreases systemic risk in the U.S. banking sector. We estimate the sensitivity of weekly bank trading net profits to a variety of aggregate risk factors, which include equities, fixed-income, derivatives, foreign exchange, and commodities. We find that U.S. banks had large trading exposures to equity market risk before the introduction of the Volcker Rule in 2014 and that they curtailed these exposures afterwards. Pre-rule equity risk exposures were large across the board of the main asset classes, including fixed-income. There is also evidence of smaller exposures to credit and currency risk. We corroborate the main finding on equity risk with a quasi-natural experiment that exploits the phased-in introduction of reporting requirements to refine identification, and an optimal changepoint regression that estimates time-varying exposures to address rebalancing. A stress-test calibration indicates that the Volcker Rule was an effective financial-stability regulation, as even a 5% drop in stock market returns would have led to material aggregate trading losses for banks in the pre-Volcker period, as large as about 3% (1.5%) of sector-wide market risk weighted assets (tier 1 capital).