Why Do Financial Literacy Programmes Fail?

Numerous studies have found a positive relationship between financial literacy andfinancial experience. Typically, this relationship is interpreted as being a causal relationship,i.e. an increase in financial literacy leads to better financial decision making. However, asimple relationship cannot be interpreted in a causal way. In this paper, we show evidencefor a causal relationship running the opposite way, i.e. people with more financial experienceseem to acquire more financial knowledge and become more financially literate. Thisfinding has important implications as it suggests that programmes targeted at improvingfinancial literacy could be more effective if they incorporate experiential components.