Policy-effective financial knowledge and attitude factors

Abstract

In this paper, we consolidate two objectives of the financial inclusion literature: producing meaningful measures of financial knowledge and financial attitudes and providing guidance to policymakers in cost-benefit analysis for the comparison of financial education interventions. We call them policy-effective factors. For this, we estimate a system of equations in which the dependent binary variables represent financial behavior and explanatory variables include knowledge and attitude variables and controls. Using Brazilian data from OECD/INFE survey 2015, we find one knowledge factor and two attitude factors that help predict behavior outcomes.