Financial education and spillover effects

Abstract Using a newly introduced, semester-long university course on financial education in Cyprus, a country of low financial literacy, we find evidence of financial knowledge spillovers from university students to their parents. We measure the financial knowledge score of students and parents before and after the introduction of the course, using both a treatment and a control sample. The spillover effect is economically significant, and it is driven by the subsample of students who have frequent face-to-face interaction with their parents.