Lusardi - Advice to Beginning College Students

Anna Lusardi is a Darthmouth economist and expert on financial literacy, among other things. In this post on her blog she gives some useful advice to students starting college. Basically, try to get some financial literacy either by going to a financial advice course or, to get extreme, actually take an economics course. She argues that people from families who have no history in investing in stocks, bonds or other financial instruments are at a particular disadvantage.

Financial Literacy and Retirement Readiness

Those working on ageing as well as literacy may be interested to see how financial literacy affects the retirement decision.

How Ordinary Consumers Make Complex Economic Decisions: Financial Literacy and Retirement Readiness

Annamaria Lusardi, Olivia S. Mitchell

This paper reports on several self-assessed and objective measures of financial literacy newly added to the American Life Panel (ALP), and it links these performance measures to efforts consumers make to plan for retirement. We evaluate the causal relationship between financial literacy and retirement planning by exploiting information about respondents’ financial knowledge acquired in school - before entering the labor market and certainly before starting to plan for retirement. Results show that those with more advanced financial knowledge are those more likely to be retirement-ready.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w15350

Animating the Credit Crisis

Thanks to my friend Alan (a visual communications enthusiast) for sending on this animation about the credit crisis. It's also worth watching Part 2. The whole thing is ten minutes long; nothing in the content may be new for economists but it's a useful summary. And for those trying to get to grips with understanding the crisis, this should be a valuable tool.