Fed/GFLEC Financial Literacy Seminar Series

March 26, 2015

3:30 pm - 5:00 pm

Seminar II: The Impact of Bank Account Ownership on Adolescents’ Financial Literacy

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Dimitris Christelis

Research Fellow, Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance
University of Naples Federico II, Italy


FinLit Talks: Interviews with Financial Literacy Thought Leaders

LOCATION

George Washington University School of Business
Duquès Hall, Room 651
2201 G Street NW (main entrance on 22nd Street between G and H Streets)

Bio: Dimitris Christelis

Dimitris Christelis is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance at the University of Naples Federico II. He has worked as a senior economist in the Directorate General Research of the European Central Bank and has consulted on micro survey issues with the Bank of Greece, the European Central Bank, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Québec at Montréal, and the World Bank. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

In his research he primarily uses micro data surveys to study issues related to household finance. Some of the topics he has worked on include the effect of cognitive abilities, health insurance coverage and fear of terrorism on risky financial asset investment, the analysis of differences in household portfolio choices across different countries, the interaction between different modes of stockholding, the effect of unemployment and capital losses during the Great Recession on household consumption, and the determinants of the financial literacy of teenage children.

He has also worked on issues related to health economics, including the cross-country analysis of smoking persistence and the impact of being socially and physically active on cognitive abilities in older age. Finally, he has also been involved with the production of micro data surveys, as he participated in the design of the questionnaire and implemented the imputation of missing data for the first two waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe.

 


 

Abstract

Co-authored with Dimitris Georgarakos (Deutsche Bundesbank and University of Leicester) and Annamaria Lusardi (GFLEC)

Using data from 18 countries that participated in the 2012 PISA wave, we examine the causal impact of bank account ownership on adolescents’ financial literacy. We use nonparametric partial identification methods that use weak assumptions in order to bound both the average and the quantile treatment effects. We find that bank account ownership has a significant positive effect on adolescents’ financial literacy, with the lower bound of the average treatment effect being about 0.15 standard deviations of the test score. We also find important effects at various quantiles, with Western European and Anglo-Saxon countries exhibiting stronger effects at higher quantiles, while the opposite is true for Eastern European countries.