Financial Literacy and Stock Market Participation
Financial Literacy and Stock Market Participation
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DOI：
10.2139/ssrn.1476958
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发表时间：
2007
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
M. van Rooij;A. Lusardi;R. Alessie
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
M. van Rooij;A. Lusardi;R. Alessie
个人退休后越来越多地负责自己的财务保障。此外，多年来，复杂金融产品的供应大幅增加。然而，我们仍然很少或根本没有关于个人是否拥有驾驭这一新金融环境的金融知识和技能的信息。为了更好地理解金融知识及其与金融决策的关系，我们为DNB住户调查设计了两个特殊模块。我们设计了一些问题来衡量计算能力和与通胀和利率运作相关的基本知识，以及一些问题来衡量与金融市场工具(股票、债券和共同基金)相关的更高级的金融知识。我们通过研究金融知识与股市的关系来评估金融知识的重要性：拥有更多金融知识的人是否更有可能持有股票？为了评估因果关系的方向，我们在投资股票市场之前，利用衡量金融知识的问题。我们发现，尽管对与通胀和利率复合相关的基本经济概念的理解还远远不完善，但它比有限的股票和债券知识、风险分散概念和金融市场的运作要好得多。我们还发现，金融知识的测量对调查问题的措辞非常敏感。这为有限的金融知识提供了额外的证据。最后，我们报告了金融知识对股市参与度的独立影响的证据：那些金融知识水平较低的人投资股票的可能性显著降低。
Individuals are increasingly put in charge of their financial security after retirement. Moreover, the supply of complex financial products has increased considerably over the years. However, we still have little or no information about whether individuals have the financial knowledge and skills to navigate this new financial environment. To better understand financial literacy and its relation to financial decision-making, we have devised two special modules for the DNB Household Survey. We have designed questions to measure numeracy and basic knowledge related to the working of inflation and interest rates, as well as questions to measure more advanced financial knowledge related to financial market instruments (stocks, bonds, and mutual funds). We evaluate the importance of financial literacy by studying its relation to the stock market: Are more financially knowledgeable individuals more likely to hold stocks? To assess the direction of causality, we make use of questions measuring financial knowledge before investing in the stock market. We find that, while the understanding of basic economic concepts related to inflation and interest rate compounding is far from perfect, it outperforms the limited knowledge of stocks and bonds, the concept of risk diversification, and the working of financial markets. We also find that the measurement of financial literacy is very sensitive to the wording of survey questions. This provides additional evidence for limited financial knowledge. Finally, we report evidence of an independent effect of financial literacy on stock market participation: Those who have low financial literacy are significantly less likely to invest in stocks.