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The potential implications of gender differences in financial literacy are far-reaching. This paper describes the findings of a review of the literature on gender differences in financial literacy with the aim to better understand their causes and consequences, as well as possible policy responses. It provides a starting point to collect further evidence, develop analytical work and case studies, and to identify areas that deserve further research, thus paving the way for future work to be developed by the OECD and the INFE. A relatively broad range of empirical literature documents the existence of gender differences in financial literacy in various countries and along several dimensions. On average, women perform worse than men on tests of financial knowledge and have less confidence in their financial skills. However, so far policy awareness of the existence and relevance of these differences is quite low. The literature (albeit so far limited) on what drives such gender differences points to several potentially complementary explanations including differences in skills, attitudes, and opportunities. In this context, the contribution of improved and targeted financial education programmes aimed at better addressing wome's needs is promising and worth exploring further.

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Behavioral economics identifies myriad deviations from classical economic assumptions about consumer decision-making, but lacks evidence on how its diverse phenomena fit together and whether they are amenable to modeling as low-dimensional constructs. We pursue such parsimony on three fronts, with success on two and instructive failure on the third. Elicitation parsimony reduces impediments to data collection by streamlining standard methods for directly measuring a person's behavioral tendencies. We do so for 17 potentially behavioral factors per individual in a large, nationally representative sample, and several sets of results indicate that our streamlined elicitations yield low-cost, high-quality data. Behavioral sufficient statistic parsimony aggregates information across behavioral factors, within-person, to create two new lower-dimensional, consumer-level measures of behavioral tendencies. These statistics usefully capture cross-sectional variation in behavioral tendencies, strongly and negatively correlating with a rich index of financial condition even after (over-)controlling for demographics, classical risk attitudes and patience, cognitive skills including financial literacy, and survey effort. Our quest for common factor parsimony largely fails: within-consumer correlations between behavioral factors tend to be low, and the common factor contributing to all 17 behavioral factors within-individual is weakly identified and does not help explain outcomes conditional on the other covariates. Altogether our results provide many new insights into behavioral factors: their distributions, inter-relationships, distinctions from classical factors, and links to outcomes. Our findings also support the two leading approaches to modeling behavioral factors--considering them in relative isolation, and summarizing them with reduced-form sufficient statistics--and provide data and methods for honing both approaches.

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While financial knowledge has been linked to improved financial behavior, there is little consensus on the value of financial education, in part because rigorous evaluation of various programs has yielded mixed results. However, given the heterogeneity of financial education programs in the literature, focusing on "generic" financial education can be inappropriate and even misleading. Lusardi (2009) and others argue that pedagogy and delivery matter significantly. In this paper, we design and field a low-cost, easily-replicable financial education program called "Five Steps," covering five basic financial planning concepts that relate to retirement. We conduct a field experiment to evaluate the overall impact of "Five Steps" on a probability sample of the American population. In different treatment arms, we quantify the relative impact of delivering the program through video and narrative formats. Our results show that short videos and narratives (each takes about three minutes) have sizable short-run effects on objective measures of respondent knowledge. Moreover, keeping informational content relatively constant, format has significant effects on other psychological levers of behavioral change: effects on motivation and self-efficacy are significantly higher when videos are used, which ultimately influences knowledge acquisition. Follow-up tests of respondents' knowledge approximately eight months after the interventions suggest that between one-quarter and one-third of the knowledge gains and about one-fifth of the self-efficacy gains persist. Thus, this simple program has effects both in the short run and medium run.