L’educazione finanziaria come una nuova dimensione del capitale umano: evidenze empiriche da un esperimento casuale e sul nesso tra crisi economica e alfabetizzazione finanziaria

The financial and economic crisis has increased the attention of academicians and policymakers on the importance of economic and financial literacy. This paper provides a synthesis of a PhD dissertation on topics related to financial education as a specific field of the more general issue of human capital and socioeconomic wellbeing. The first and second part of the dissertation present and discuss results from a randomized experiment on financial education run on secondary-school classes in three Italian cities. The findings obtained document the benefits of financial education, especially when the outcomes are distinguished by learning topic. Students in fact, significantly improve their knowledge on issues concerning institutional finance and macroeconomics, but not on ones concerning everyday life economics. The third part documents that people have searched more intensively the Internet for answers to their economic and financial questions during the period of financial crisis. Hence, the financial crisis itself proved to be an occasion enhancing the interest in financial and economic issues with consequences on financial literacy, especially for the part more directly related to the crisis itself.