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Family Financial Socialization and Wealth Decisions

  • Alessandro Bucciol ORCID logo EMAIL logo , Martina Manfrè and Marcella Veronesi ORCID logo

Abstract

We study the relationship between family financial socialization acquired during adolescence and a wide range of wealth decisions during adulthood, and compare the correlation of family financial socialization with that of financial literacy. Our findings highlight the importance of family financial socialization during young age on all the dimensions investigated, except for risky asset holding. The correlations between family financial socialization and wealth decisions are not different from those of financial literacy except for the size of financial assets, risky assets holding, and debt holding. While for males both financial literacy and financial socialization are correlated with wealth decisions, for females mainly family financial socialization seems to matter. Our findings underline the importance of acquiring financial education not only through proper educational programs, but also in the family environment during adolescence, where teens can learn positive attitudes towards money that are maintained throughout their life.

JEL Classification: D14; I22

Corresponding author: Alessandro Bucciol, Department of Economics, University of Verona, Via Cantarane 24, Verona, 37129, Italy, E-mail:

Author note: We thank Sarah Brown, Gianni De Fraja, Alberto Montagnoli, Diego Ronchetti, Karl Taylor and Serena Trucchi for useful discussions, as well as the seminar participants to the 2018 AEDE Meeting in Barcelona and the 2018 SIE Conference in Bologna. Declarations of interest: none. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. The usual disclaimers apply.


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Supplementary Material

The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/bejeap-2021-0065).


Received: 2021-02-18
Revised: 2022-01-19
Accepted: 2022-01-20
Published Online: 2022-02-03

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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