Financial teaching and financial understanding amongst young people

Abstract

This paper examines the gender gap in financial understanding amongst 11–18 year-olds in Scotland. A regression analysis is carried out based on individual-level data collected in the 2014 Young People in Scotland Survey (N = 2016). This survey was supplemented with questions measuring financial understanding, along with questions relating to the teaching of economics, finance and business studies as school subjects. The analysis suggests that there is a large gender gap favouring males of nearly 30 %. In addition, the teaching of economics, finance and business studies has a large positive effect on financial understanding. This effect is about four times larger for males compared to females. An Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition suggests that most of the gender gap is explained by this difference. More generally, the analysis suggests that the beginnings of the adult gender gap in financial understanding is when individuals are in school.