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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Numeracy And Financial Wellbeing During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Nora Wikoff
Numeracy And Financial Wellbeing During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Nora Wikoff
Numeracy
This paper examines the role of numeracy in smoothing financial difficulties during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results show that numeracy was associated with a 30% reduction in late or non-payment of bills and a 20% reduction in the odds of feeling financially squeezed. The effect of numeracy on financial wellbeing was remarkably consistent across levels of education, ethnicity, and gender, suggesting that improving numeracy levels in the population may be an effective strategy to increase financial capability across the board. However, while numerate individuals were less likely to experience financial difficulty, high numeracy did not predict narrower gaps between Whites …
The Geography Of Financial Literacy, Christopher Bumcrot, Judy Lin, Annamaria Lusardi
The Geography Of Financial Literacy, Christopher Bumcrot, Judy Lin, Annamaria Lusardi
Numeracy
This paper explores how well equipped today’s households are to make complex financial decisions in the face of often high-cost and high-risk financial instruments. Specifically we focus on financial literacy. Most importantly, we describe the geography of financial literacy, i.e., how financial literacy is distributed across the fifty US states. We describe the correlation of financial literacy and some important aggregate variables, such as state-level poverty rates. Finally, we examine the extent to which differences in financial literacy can be explained by states’ demographic and economic characteristics. To assess financial literacy, five questions were added to the 2009 National Financial …