The effect of financial education training on the financial literacy of Spanish students in PISA

The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of financial education training on Spanish secondary students. To do this, we rely on data from PISA 2012. This included an assessment of students' financial literacy for the first time. In order to identify the causal effect of financial education courses, we employ a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach to compare the outcomes of students receiving and not receiving education on financial concepts for two different subjects (financial literacy and reading comprehension). Our results suggest that financial education programs only have an impact if they are taught as part of other subjects, i.e. by means of a cross-curricular approach.