Who intends to become financially literate? Insights from the Theory of Planned Behaviour

Despite the importance that policy-makers acknowledge to financial education, little is known about the demand for financial literacy (especially among the least literate individuals). We here build on the social-psychological framework of the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) to study the intention to learn more about savings and investments as a function of attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control, also controlling for individual background factors, including psychological traits. We develop a novel TPB-based module for the CONSOB 2018 Survey on financial investments by Italian households, administered to 1,601 individuals. The analyses conducted also through structural equation models show that attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control are significant determinants of intentions to learn more about savings and investments, as predicted by TPB. Differences in attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control contribute to financial literacy gaps for women and less literate individuals in general. In analogy to other fields, interventions in the area of financial literacy should also target the determinants of individuals’ intentions, especially for adults that are generally involved in financial education programs on a voluntary basis.