Political participation and financial education: Understanding personal and collective tradeoffs for a better citizenship

Abstract

The paper documents a positive association between political participation, measured by the number of citizens voting at national elections, and awareness of the tradeoffs behind both private and public decisions that indicators of basic financial education can capture. The association is robust to the inclusion of a range of controls, stronger for the most difficult concepts of risk diversification and interest compounding, and consistent with the hypothesis that in countries where financial education is higher due to national cultural traits, voter turnout at national elections is higher.