Keywords
financial literacy, self-assessment, financial education, gender, race
Abstract
This study examines the level of financial literacy and self-assessed financial literacy amongst members of a South African tertiary institution’s retirement fund. Based on surveys of the fund’s members, I employ descriptive statistics and multivariate regression analyses to examine differences in financial literacy within and across groups. The results show that, despite working for an employer implementing many best practices identified by financial literacy advocates, respondents from all demographic subgroups possess relatively low levels of financial knowledge. Men, White respondents, and those with a higher cost of employment or higher educational attainment were more likely to have a higher level of financial knowledge. In addition, while most respondents were accurate in their self-assessments of financial literacy, those less accurate self-assessments typically underestimated their abilities. The general accuracy of self-perception implies a self-awareness that can be appropriately exploited to attract less-numerate individuals to training courses. Overall, the findings suggest we might more efficiently target training to subsets of individuals.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5038/1936-4660.12.1.11
Recommended Citation
Willows, Gizelle D.. "Actual and Self-Assessed Financial Literacy among Employees of a South African University." Numeracy 12, Iss. 1 (2019): Article 11. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5038/1936-4660.12.1.11
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
