Financial and demographic education effectiveness in academic and vocational high schools: a randomised experiment

The chapter reports the impact of a randomized controlled trial aimed at testing the effect of delivering both demographic and financial education in academic and vocational schools, with a total sample of 1134 students from 22 high schools in Northern Itay. The treatment was represented by a set of online lectures (two on basic finance concepts and one on demography) aimed at both raising the competencies of students and their interest towards financial literacy and financial planning.The test explicitly aimed at checking the effectiveness of the treatment separately for academic and vocational schools, considering the different socio-economic background of the population of the two types of schools.Results show that the improvement on financial literacy is statistically significant in academic schools only, whereas improvements on demographic literacy are statisticaally significant in all schools (where there is a widespread significant effect also on self-assessed preceived importance of demographic issues). By splitting vocational and academic students in two further subsamples based on above/below median school performance (measured by grades in maths and Italian) it is possible to see that treatment effectiveness for financial literacy is statistically significant in the above-median subgroup of vocational school students, with effects which are similar to the ones in the below-median subsample of academic schools. The experiment therefore suggests that financial education efforts can be at least partially effective even in schools with a lower average socio-economic status of students, at least for those who tend to me more willing to learn, and combining financial with demographic education may contribute to explain the importance of a longer-term approach at personal decisions, including financial planning.