Education and saving:

Household survey data on adults who attended high school between the 1950s and 1980s, matched to the timing of state consumer-education mandates

US adults, surveyed in the mid-1990s, whose high-school years fell before or after their state adopted a consumer-education/personal-finance curriculum mandate.

The founding result of the financial-education-mandate literature, recorded here because it is the claim the archive is grading rather than because it survives. Exposure is assigned by the interaction of state of high-school attendance and cohort, and outcomes are self-reported adult saving rates and wealth. The identifying weakness is what later killed it: the specification did not include state fixed effects, so any time-invariant difference between mandating and non-mandating states loads onto the estimate. Recorded at abstract depth — the numbers here are not extracted, only the claim and its fate. The full registered title is "Education and saving: The long-term effects of high school financial curriculum mandates"; Crossref registers the main title and subtitle separately, which is why the title field reads as it does.

Adults who attended high school in states after those states adopted consumer-education mandates reported higher rates of saving and greater accumulated wealth than adults from the same states who graduated earlier, with the effect emerging gradually after the mandates took hold. The paper became the standard citation for "high-school financial education works", and it was cited that way for fifteen years.

Medium-to-high in effect. The design is cohort-by-state exposure, which is not chosen by families, but without state fixed effects the estimate can be driven by stable differences between the kinds of states that legislate consumer education and those that do not — including differences in the human capital of their populations.

FAILED. Cole, Paulson & Shastry (2016) study the same mandates with the census, the FRBNY Consumer Credit Panel and SIPP, and report that the result is not robust to the simple inclusion of state fixed effects; they find no effect on saving, investment income, credit score, delinquency, bankruptcy or foreclosure. Under METHODOLOGY's replication rule this caps any verdict resting on it at mixed. It is retained as included rather than excluded because the archive grades the claim, and a superseded flagship is evidence about the literature.