Economics education and financial literacy acquisition: Evidence from a field experiment

We investigate how attending an undergraduate course in economics affects students’ financial literacy. The specific conditions of the course, which was compulsorily taken by law students at the University of Firenze, reproduce a quasi-experiment that enables us to isolate the effect of the course and provides solid evidence on its effect. We find that attending the course has positive effects on financial literacy and that the gain is most relevant for students coming from backgrounds associated with lower financial literacy. The gain is large for topics closer to what was taught in the course but small for other economic issues. From a policy perspective, our evidence provides support for the feasibility and efficacy of policies promoting general economics education, and it also stresses the redistributive and egalitarian character of such policies.