A Method for Evaluating the Quality of Financial Decision Making, with an Application to Financial Education

Previously circulated as "The Effect of Financial Education on the Quality of Decision Making." We thank Charles Sprenger, Steven Sheffrin, GlenWeyl, as well as participants at the Research Forum on the Effectiveness of Financial Education at the University of Arizona, the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics, the Journées Louis- André Gérard-Varet in Aix-en-Provence, the New York University, the Murphy Institute's conference on Expanding the Frontiers in Behavioral Public Economics, the Cherry Blossom Financial Education Institute at the George Washington University, the Roybal Conference on Complexity in Decision Making at the University of Southern California, the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, the TIAA Institute Fellows Symposium, the 2016 ASSA Meetings in San Francisco, the George Washington University Financial Literacy Seminar Series, and the Workshop on the Behavioral Economics of Financial Markets at the University of Zurich for helpful comments and suggestions. Fulya Yuksel Ersoy provided excellent research assistance. We appreciate funding from the TIAA-CREF and the Department of Economics at Stanford University. The experiment was approved in Stanford IRB protocol 29615. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• Online Appendix

• October 23, 2014
• July 24, 2015
• August 8, 2016