TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Sutter, Matthias
AU  - Weyland, Michael
AU  - Untertrifaller, Anna
AU  - Froitzheim, Manuel
        TI  - Financial Literacy, Risk and Time Preferences: Results from a Randomized Educational Intervention
        PY  - 2020/Aug/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 13566
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp13566
        AB  - We present the results of a randomized intervention in schools to study how teaching financial literacy affects risk and time preferences of adolescents. Following more than 600 adolescents, aged 16 years on average, over about half a year, we provide causal evidence that teaching financial literacy has significant short-term and longer-term effects on risk and time preferences. Compared to two different control treatments, we find that teaching financial literacy makes subjects more patient, less present-biased, and slightly more risk-averse. Our finding that the intervention changes economic preferences contributes to a better understanding of why financial literacy has been shown to correlate systematically with financial behavior in previous studies. We argue that the link between financial literacy and field behavior works through economic preferences. In our study, the latter are also related in a meaningful way to students' field behavior.
        KW  - time preferences
KW  - risk preferences
KW  - randomized intervention
KW  - financial literacy
KW  - field experiment
        ER  -