Financial Education & Literacy

Living down the Lattes

11/05/13

Credit Slips is a virtual community so very few of you know that I go to Starbucks at least once a day, although a small detail in the pic here was a hint in that direction.

[more]

Financial Education in Singapore

03/31/13

As Lauren's work has detailed, there's a veritable financial literacy industry in the United States. The CFPB is even charged with undertaking certain financial literacy initiatives. As it turns out Singapore is a full decade ahead of us on this front.  The government of Singapore has a quite good financial education website.  

[more]

National Consumer Protection Week and Disclosure 3.0

03/06/13

It’s National Consumer Protection Week (NCPW)!   Federal, state, local, and nonprofit consumer protection agencies and organizations are making extra efforts to promote consumer awareness. 

First I have to get out of my system thoughts of Tom Lehrer’s song, National Brotherhood Week:

                Step up and shake the hand/Of someone you can’t stand . . .

[more]

Disclosure 2.5: Moving from the Lab to the Field

02/18/13

If financial education classes and lab-tested disclosures are unlikely to help consumers in their real-world financial decisions, what about field-tested targeted education/disclosure? Exciting work by Marianne Bertrand and Adair Morse shows that information given to payday borrowers can reduce their future borrowing, holding payday lender behavior static.

[more]

Disclosure 3.0: Making Disclosure Smarter

02/12/13

What if, instead of making the consumer smarter or the disclosures more comprehensible, as discussed in my last several posts, we made financial product disclosures smarter?

[more]

Putting Disclosure to the Test: User Comprehension Requirements

02/12/13

Given the limitations of Disclosure 2.0 and Disclosure 2.5 I described in my last posts, what is to be done? To answer this question, we might first ask what financial product disclosure is attempting to achieve. Although disclosure has several aims, one is consumer comprehension to the degree necessary to enable good decisions. Disclosure rules require particular information to be imparted, often in a specified format.

[more]

Which Consumer Financial Education Programs Are Most Effective?: Assuming a Fact Not in Evidence

02/12/13

Thank you to the Credit Slips team for inviting me to guest blog.  First I must warn the reader that I am not a real blogger (I’m a bit of a Luddite - I don’t even have a smartphone).  But I’m going to join the 21st Century for a bit here.  Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be sharing my thoughts and some recent research pertinent to modes of consumer financial protection, from financial literacy education to policy defaults to product regulation.  As some of you already know, I have been critical of all of these.  But here I will also sug

[more]