Mediation gap between mental accounting and financial education evidenced by a scoping review

Abstract Financial education is a central instrument of policies aimed at household financial well-being, yet meta-analytic evidence shows that standalone interventions explain little of the variance in financial behavior. Formal knowledge, however, passes through the filter of the mental accounts in which each person sorts resources, so that part of what is taught may never reach the decision. This study aimed to map the analytical configurations through which Scopus-indexed research links mental accounting and financial education between 2015 and 2025, by means of a scoping review, in order to estimate how often the pathway running from financial education through mental-account structure to observed behavior is actually tested. Following PRISMA-ScR, with a protocol registered in the Open Science Framework, we read the full text of 139 articles and coded the functional role of both constructs, synthesizing the resulting map through the Theory–Context–Characteristics–Methods framework. The two constructs share the same model in fewer than one article in five, financial education alone receives an analytical position in 51.1%, mental accounting mediates in 2.9%, and the complete pathway, in 1.4%. The modal configuration (30.2%) measures financial education as an outcome with mental accounting outside the model, and mental accounting is operationalized in 40 of the 139 articles, against 97 for financial education (OR 5.7; 95% CI 3.3 to 9.9), so that the field assesses education without measuring the mental accounting that links knowledge to behavior. The agenda thus begins with a validated instrument for mental-account structure. JEL Classification: D14 · G41 · G53