Brown Bag Seminar: Evaluating a Financial Education National Campaign: Experimental Evidence from Italy

We study the causal effects of a national information campaign designed to foster the financial literacy of the Italian population. The campaign involves major media such as national television, print, and social media. To this end, we conduct a randomized encouragement experiment with a representative sample of 3,798 individuals in Italy offering monetary incentives to follow elements of the national campaign. The experiment contrasts two different edutainment treatments delivered via national television (a soap opera and a quiz show) and an information treatment (commercial) delivered via print, radio, and social media relative to a pure control group. Short-term effects measured about three months after intervention suggest muted effects, on average, motivating an investigation of heterogenous treatment effects: We find that women show improvements in institutional awareness instead men show a decreased self-assessed financial knowledge and an increased financial knowledge compared to the control group. One and a half years later, data shows an increase in both institutional awareness and financial knowledge.