This report evaluates the impacts of KDI Economic Information and Education Center (EIEC)’s economic education program to middle school students in Sejong city in 2016. The program was designed to give 7th grade students a two-hour weekly economic education session for 8 weeks. Students participated in a group-based project to provide financial advice for clients while hosting a virtual TV show ‘Master of Financial Planning.’ It is expected that students come to understand the core economic concepts such as income, expenditure, asset, credit, and reasonable consumption when engaging in the program.

In order to evaluate the program impacts, we restricted the sample to schools where two classes sequentially participated in the economic education program and used difference-in-differences specification by exploiting the variation of students’ program participation timing within a school. 264 students in six middle schools in Sejong city participated in the surveys with the informed consents from students, parents, and schools. The baseline survey was conducted in August 2016 right before the economic education program started, The endline survey was conducted in October 2016 after completing the eight-week program for the first batch of students. We collected students’ economic knowledge, financial literacy, behaviors, preference, rational decision making, and other background information such as socio-economic status through self-reported questionnaire and lab experiments.

We find that the economic education program has some positive impacts on students’ economic knowledge but does not have significant impacts on behaviors, preference, quality of decision making. Considering the fact that the EIEC’s economic education program was only for eight weeks (16 hours in total), the short-term economic education may have limitations on influencing behaviors, preferences, and decision making quality. Meanwhile, we find heterogeneity on students’ economic knowledge, behaviors, preferences, decision making quality by cognitive ability and gender. Those who have higher cognitive ability tend to have higher economic knowledge, risk-loving preference, and rational decision making. Female students are more risk-averse, are likely to experience more imitative consumption, are less consistent and stationary in time preference, compared to male students even after controlling cognitive ability and household characteristics.

발간사
요 약

제1장 서 론

제2장 연구설계
　제1절 경제교육 프로그램
　제2절 연구설계

제3장 조사설계
　제1절 경제적 선호와 의사결정의 질
　제2절 경제지식
　제3절 경제적 행동

제4장 실증분석
　제1절 데이터
　제2절 실증모형

제5장 추정 결과
　제1절 추정 결과 예시: 경제지식의 경우
　제2절 추정 결과

제6장 요약 및 결론

참고문헌
ABSTRACT