American Economic Review
ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)
Fictional Money, Real Costs: Impacts of Financial Salience on Disadvantaged Students
American Economic Review
vol. 112,
no. 3, March 2022
(pp. 798–826)
(Complimentary)
Abstract
Disadvantaged students perform differentially worse when randomly given a financially salient mathematics exam. For students with socioeconomic indicators below the national median, a 10 percentage point increase in the share of monetary themed questions depresses exam performance by 0.026 standard deviations, about 6 percent of their performance gap. Using question-level data, I confirm the role of financial salience by comparing performance on monetary and highly similar non-monetary questions. Leveraging the randomized ordering of questions, I identify an effect on subsequent questions, providing evidence that the attention capture effects of poverty affect policy relevant outcomes outside of experimental settings.Citation
Duquennois, Claire. 2022. "Fictional Money, Real Costs: Impacts of Financial Salience on Disadvantaged Students." American Economic Review, 112 (3): 798–826. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20201661Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- G53 Household Finance: Financial Literacy
- I21 Analysis of Education
- I24 Education and Inequality
- I32 Measurement and Analysis of Poverty
- J13 Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
- O15 Economic Development: Human Resources; Human Development; Income Distribution; Migration