IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/jrp/jrpwrp/2025-0007.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Stereotypes, financial literacy, and confidence: An information provision experiment

Author

Listed:
  • Julia Peter

    (Friedrich Schiller University Jena)

  • Jana Schuetz

    (Jönköping International Business School)

Abstract

Financial literacy is an important prerequisite for making informed financial decisions, but it remains low, especially among women and older people. Internalized stereotypes can undermine confidence and subsequently affect behavior in financial matters, leading to suboptimal decisions. This paper investigates how stereotype salience affects confidence in financial literacy. In an information provision experiment, we inform respondents about age or gender differences in numeracy to examine the impact on financial literacy, confidence, hypothetical investment and saving decisions, and demand for information and education. We find that being informed about age differences has no significant effect. In contrast, being informed about gender differences increases the confidence of male respondents through a stereotype boost, while leaving female respondents largely unaffected.

Suggested Citation

  • Julia Peter & Jana Schuetz, 2025. "Stereotypes, financial literacy, and confidence: An information provision experiment," Jena Economics Research Papers 2025-007, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena.
    • Handle: RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2025-0007
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://oweb.b67.uni-jena.de/Papers/jerp2023/wp_2025_007.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    survey experiment; numeracy; gender stereotypes; age stereotypes;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C90 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - General
    • D91 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making
    • G53 - Financial Economics - - Household Finance - - - Financial Literacy
    • I24 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Education and Inequality
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2025-0007. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Markus Pasche (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.jenecon.de .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.