Fort, Margherita
[Verfasser:in]
;
Manaresi, Francesco
[Sonstige Person, Familie und Körperschaft];
Trucchi, Serena
[Sonstige Person, Familie und Körperschaft]
Banks Information Policies, Financial Literacy and Household Wealth
Erschienen in:Quaderni DSE Working Paper ; No. 852
Umfang:
1 Online-Ressource (43 p)
Sprache:
Englisch
DOI:
10.2139/ssrn.2171259
Identifikator:
Entstehung:
Anmerkungen:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments November 5, 2012 erstellt
Beschreibung:
We investigate the causal effect of financial literacy on financial assets, exploiting banks information policies for identification. In Italy, banks who belong to the PattiChiari consortium have implemented policies aimed at increasing transparency and procedural simplification. These policies may affect individuals' financial literacy without involving any direct cost for clients in terms of time, effort or resources, as we show in the paper. We exploit confidential information on whether individuals have their main bank account in one bank in the PattiChiari consortium to instrument their financial literacy level. We show that these policies have a positive and significant effect on both knowledge of financial instruments and household financial assets. Our results suggest that banks information policies have the potential to be an effective tool to increase individuals' financial literacy and that the relationship between financial literacy and wealth is largely underestimated by standard regression models