Does Financial Education Impact Financial Literacy and Financial Behavior, and if so, When?

In a meta-analysis of 126 impact evaluation studies, we find that financial education significantly impacts financial behavior and, to an even larger extent, financial literacy. These results also hold for the subsample of randomized experiments (RCTs). However, intervention impacts are highly heterogeneous: Financial education is less effective for low-income clients as well as in low and lower-middle income economies. Specific behaviors, such as the handling of debt, are more difficult to influence and mandatory financial education tentatively appears to be less effective. Thus, intervention success depends crucially on increasing education intensity and offering financial education at a 'teachable moment'

Transnationaler Einfluss auf Urbanen Wandel. Moderne Projekte in Vinh, Vietnam

Following an “agency-oriented Urban Theory” as advanced by Smith (2001), this study takes the urban landscape of Vinh City in Central Vietnam as a starting point into an investigation of multiple visions of modernity (Eisenstadt, 2000) put forward by social actors, as well as into urban change resulting from the implementation of such visions. Focusing on the period from 1973 to 2011, it traces the application of three different visions for urban development in Vinh: The Socialist City, The Modern and Civilized City, and the Participatory City. Projects aiming at implementing these visions in Vinh that are presented in this study have one thing in common: they are informed by a specific view of what a city is and what it should be, and their implementation aims at changing the city in the desired direction. This goal involves not only physical change of the city, but also institutional change in the urban society. To grasp the interplay between visions of a modern city, their application through concrete projects, and the results of these implementations, the study operates with two specific terms: modern projects, and urban change. After introducing Vinh and its history, the thesis presents the period of the vision of The Socialist City and its application in Vinh through cooperation between Vietnam and the German Democratic Republic in the 1970s. It then moves on to contemporary period starting in the 1990s, during which varying and conflicting modern projects for the city were put forward by different social actors cooperating in joint projects on urban development: the Modern and Civilized City and the Participatory City. While the modes of cooperation differed between the two periods, the study concludes with the argument that the impact of these transnational projects has led to path-dependent, as well as ambivalent, urban change in Vinh.Orientiert an einer "agency-oriented Urban Theory" (Smith 2001) nimmt diese Studie die gebaute städtische Landschaft der Stadt Vinh in Zentralvietnam als Ausgangspunkt für die Untersuchung multipler Visionen von Moderne (Eisenstadt 2000) sowie des aus der Umsetzung dieser Visionen resultierenden urbanen Wandels. Im Fokus der Arbeit steht der Zeitraum von 1973 bis 2011, in dem drei verschiedene Visionen für die Entwicklung der Stadt Vinh propagiert wurden: Die Sozialistische Stadt, Die Moderne und Zivilisierte Stadt sowie die Partizipative Stadt. Projekte die auf die Umsetzung dieser Visionen in Vinh abzielten hatten eines gemeinsam: sie bauten auf bestimmten Vorstellungen davon, was eine Stadt ist, und was sie sein sollte, auf. Zudem zielten sie auf einen Wandel hin in die gewünschte Richtung ab. Dies zielte nicht nur auf räumliche Änderungen ab, sondern auch auf institutionellen Wandel der städtischen Gesellschaft. Um das Zusammenspiel von Visionen der Modernen Stadt, ihrer Umsetzung in konkrete Projekten, sowie die Resultate dieser Umsetzungen erfassen zu können arbeitet die Studie mit zwei spezifischen Begriffen: moderne Projekte und Urbaner Wandel. Nachdem die Stadt Vinh und ihre Geschichte vorgestellt werden, präsentiert die Arbeit die Periode in der die Sozialistische Stadt als Leitbild für den Aufbau der Stadt Vinh diente und durch Kooperation zwischen Vietnam und der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik umgesetzt wurde. Anschließen befasst sie sich mit der in den 1990er Jahren begonnenen, und gegenwärtig andauernden, Phase in der verschiedene Akteure in gemeinsamen Projekte konkurrierende Vorstellungen der Stadtentwicklung propagierten: die Moderne und Zivilisierte Stadt sowie die Partizipative Stadt. Als Ergebnis argumentiert die Arbeit das zwar die Formen der Zusammenarbeit in beiden Phasen unterschiedliche waren, dass diese transnationalen Projekte jedoch zu pfadabhängigem sowie ambivalentem urbanen Wandel in Vinh geführt haben

Essays on financial education and behavioral household finance

Over the course of the past twenty years, globalization and the integration of financial systems have led to an increased complexity in financial markets. Living in such a globalized market-economy requires individuals and households to be equipped with a certain set of knowledge and skills to make well-informed and thoughtful decisions. In developing economies, the integration of financial systems has led to financial inclusion of populations that have little experience with the complexity of formal financial products. Many fear that these developments may outpace the capacity of individuals and households to make informed financial choices. Unfortunately, evidence from an abundance of survey-data seems to suggest that individuals may indeed lack the financial literacy necessary to deal with these complexities. This dissertation contributes to this literature and consists of four papers on financial education and household finance. The first two papers are included in part I "Causal effects of financial education". This part uses a quantitative meta-analysis and a randomized field experiment to estimate the causal effects of financial education programs on financial literacy and individual financial behavior. The second part (II "Research on economic and social science education") seeks to contribute to the discourse in the field of research on economic and social science education: The two papers examine determinants teacher-professionalism and qualitative conceptions of students in schools respectively

Contrastive Language-Image Pretrained (CLIP) Models are Powerful Out-of-Distribution Detectors

We present a comprehensive experimental study on pretrained feature extractors for visual out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. We examine several setups, based on the availability of labels or image captions and using different combinations of in- and out-distributions. Intriguingly, we find that (i) contrastive language-image pretrained models achieve state-of-the-art unsupervised out-of-distribution performance using nearest neighbors feature similarity as the OOD detection score, (ii) supervised state-of-the-art OOD detection performance can be obtained without in-distribution fine-tuning, (iii) even top-performing billion-scale vision transformers trained with natural language supervision fail at detecting adversarially manipulated OOD images. Finally, we argue whether new benchmarks for visual anomaly detection are needed based on our experiments. Using the largest publicly available vision transformer, we achieve state-of-the-art performance across all $18$ reported OOD benchmarks, including an AUROC of 87.6\% (9.2\% gain, unsupervised) and 97.4\% (1.2\% gain, supervised) for the challenging task of CIFAR100 $\rightarrow$ CIFAR10 OOD detection. The code will be open-sourced

Financial Education Affects Financial Knowledge and Downstream Behaviors

We study the rapidly growing literature on the causal effects of financial education programs in a meta-analysis of 76 randomized experiments with a total sample size of over 160,000 individuals. The evidence shows that financial education programs have, on average, positive causal treatment effects on financial knowledge and downstream financial behaviors. Treatment effects are economically meaningful in size, similar to those realized by educational interventions in other domains and are at least three times as large as the average effect documented in earlier work. These results are robust to the method used, restricting the sample to papers published in top economics journals, including only studies with adequate power, and accounting for publication selection bias in the literature. We conclude with a discussion of the cost-effectiveness of financial education interventions

The Information Technology Workforce: A Comparision Of Critical Skills Of Clients And Service Providers

In this article the authors explore similarities and differences in skill needs of IT service providers and the firms that providers service (clients). The results show that providers and clients are more similar than different with regard to desired skills. Client firms emphasize technical skills for new hires more than providers do despite saying that these are the skills they would outsource to providers. The results have implications for organizations’ recruiting and retention, for individuals’ career development, and for educational programs

Transnational Impact on Urban Change: Modern Projects in Vinh, Vietnam

Following an “agency-oriented Urban Theory” as advanced by Smith (2001), this study takes the urban landscape of Vinh City in Central Vietnam as a starting point into an investigation of multiple visions of modernity (Eisenstadt, 2000) put forward by social actors, as well as into urban change resulting from the implementation of such visions. Focusing on the period from 1973 to 2011, it traces the application of three different visions for urban development in Vinh: The Socialist City, The Modern and Civilized City, and the Participatory City. Projects aiming at implementing these visions in Vinh that are presented in this study have one thing in common: they are informed by a specific view of what a city is and what it should be, and their implementation aims at changing the city in the desired direction. This goal involves not only physical change of the city, but also institutional change in the urban society. To grasp the interplay between visions of a modern city, their application through concrete projects, and the results of these implementations, the study operates with two specific terms: modern projects, and urban change. After introducing Vinh and its history, the thesis presents the period of the vision of The Socialist City and its application in Vinh through cooperation between Vietnam and the German Democratic Republic in the 1970s. It then moves on to contemporary period starting in the 1990s, during which varying and conflicting modern projects for the city were put forward by different social actors cooperating in joint projects on urban development: the Modern and Civilized City and the Participatory City. While the modes of cooperation differed between the two periods, the study concludes with the argument that the impact of these transnational projects has led to path-dependent, as well as ambivalent, urban change in Vinh.Orientiert an einer "agency-oriented Urban Theory" (Smith 2001) nimmt diese Studie die gebaute städtische Landschaft der Stadt Vinh in Zentralvietnam als Ausgangspunkt für die Untersuchung multipler Visionen von Moderne (Eisenstadt 2000) sowie des aus der Umsetzung dieser Visionen resultierenden urbanen Wandels. Im Fokus der Arbeit steht der Zeitraum von 1973 bis 2011, in dem drei verschiedene Visionen für die Entwicklung der Stadt Vinh propagiert wurden: Die Sozialistische Stadt, Die Moderne und Zivilisierte Stadt sowie die Partizipative Stadt. Projekte die auf die Umsetzung dieser Visionen in Vinh abzielten hatten eines gemeinsam: sie bauten auf bestimmten Vorstellungen davon, was eine Stadt ist, und was sie sein sollte, auf. Zudem zielten sie auf einen Wandel hin in die gewünschte Richtung ab. Dies zielte nicht nur auf räumliche Änderungen ab, sondern auch auf institutionellen Wandel der städtischen Gesellschaft. Um das Zusammenspiel von Visionen der Modernen Stadt, ihrer Umsetzung in konkrete Projekten, sowie die Resultate dieser Umsetzungen erfassen zu können arbeitet die Studie mit zwei spezifischen Begriffen: moderne Projekte und Urbaner Wandel. Nachdem die Stadt Vinh und ihre Geschichte vorgestellt werden, präsentiert die Arbeit die Periode in der die Sozialistische Stadt als Leitbild für den Aufbau der Stadt Vinh diente und durch Kooperation zwischen Vietnam und der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik umgesetzt wurde. Anschließen befasst sie sich mit der in den 1990er Jahren begonnenen, und gegenwärtig andauernden, Phase in der verschiedene Akteure in gemeinsamen Projekte konkurrierende Vorstellungen der Stadtentwicklung propagierten: die Moderne und Zivilisierte Stadt sowie die Partizipative Stadt. Als Ergebnis argumentiert die Arbeit das zwar die Formen der Zusammenarbeit in beiden Phasen unterschiedliche waren, dass diese transnationalen Projekte jedoch zu pfadabhängigem sowie ambivalentem urbanen Wandel in Vinh geführt haben