DP17609 Online financial and demographic education for workers: experimental evidence from an Italian Pension Fund
We present and test experimentally a low-cost, Internet-based, literacy intervention program that we designed for implementation with the largest employer-based pension fund in Italy. The Finlife (Financial Education and Planning for a Long Life) program, included: 1) an online instructional video on financial, and demographic, literacy; 2) an experimental design that explicitly allowed evaluating the impact of the online content on financial and demographic literacy, as well as on short-term behavioral changes; 3) a follow-up that allowed assessing the subsequent choice of investment lines within the pension fund. Finlife was designed to be low-cost and scalable approach to increase financial and demographic literacy, consistently with a ‘nudge’ philosophy. We show that Finlife delivered a substantially and statistically significant increase in financial and demographic literacy, as well as a push towards seeking more information on financial markets and choices related to financial planning, and becoming more active in financial decisions.
