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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.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

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"Since the early 1990s, several states in India have introduced financial incentive programs to discourage son preference among parents and encourage investment in daughters' education and health. This study evaluates one such program in the state of Haryana, Apni Beti Apna Dhan (Our Daughter, Our Wealth). Since 1994, eligible parents in Haryana have been offered a financial incentive if they give birth to a daughter. The incentive consists of an immediate cash grant and a long-term savings bond redeemable on the daughter's 18th birthday provided she is unmarried, with additional bonuses for education. Although no specific program participation data are available, we estimate early intent-to-treat program effects on mothers (sex ratio among live children, fertility preferences) and children (mother's use of antenatal care, survival, nutritional status, immunization, schooling) using statewide household survey data on fertility and child health, and constructing proxies for household and individual program eligibility. The results based on this limited data imply that Apni Beti Apna Dhan had a positive effect on the sex ratio of living children, but inconclusive effects on mothers' preferences for having female children as well as total desired fertility. The findings also show that parents increased their investment in daughters' human capital as a result of the program. Families made greater post-natal health investments in eligible girls, with some mixed evidence of improving health status in the short and medium term. Further evidence also suggests that the early cohort of eligible school-age girls was not significantly more likely to attend school; however, conditional on first attending any school, they may be more likely to continue their education. "--World Bank web site.

Daughters --- Health status indicators --- Human capital --- Sex of children, Parental preferences for

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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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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 women’s needs is promising and worth exploring further.

Finance and Investment

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Long-term savings and investments (LTSI) by individuals enhances their financial security while also supporting growth and financial development. Evidence shows that financial knowledge and skills are positively related to LTSI behaviour, and indicates a strong correlation between levels of financial literacy and retirement wealth accumulation. However, both the quantity and quality of LTSI are often worryingly low, pointing to an important role for financial education to increase levels of financial literacy and thus improve LTSI among individuals. Evaluations of various types of financial education aimed at increasing LTSI have identified some promising results. Initial findings suggest the need for additional, targeted evaluation of education programmes to compare the effects of different delivery channels and the intensity of provision in order to identify optimal approaches. More detailed research is also important to fully understand why some evaluations indicate mixed outcomes from certain programmes.

Finance and Investment