"Educating Children to Save: an Experimental Approach to Financial Education of Pupils in Primary Schools", Dipartimento di Economia e Statistica "Cognetti de Martiis" WP 2/2015

Financial education is today a primary issue. We experimentally test whether a programme (“treatment”) of financial education on savings, targeted to children aged 8 and 9, is effective and to what extent. We measure the interest rate required by the children before and after the treatment to accept to postpone a reward, compute its variation and compare this with that of a control group. We find that children are sensitive to the programme, and that this decreases the children’s impatience. We also find some gender differences that cast some doubts about the gender neutrality of programmes of financial education.