Randomized evaluations of school based financial education programs are scarce; in fact we are aware of only two other such studies. Berry et al. (2012) conduct an evaluation of a program offering voluntary after-school clubs in Ghana for primary and junior high students in 135 schools over a 10 month period. The study randomly assigns a group of 5<sup>th</sup> and 7<sup>th</sup> graders to a social and financial treatment and another to basic training. It is not clear how exposed students are to financial decision making at such a young age, and eliciting reliable and consistent responses in this age group is generally difficult; hence there are some measurement concerns. The treatment is also short and participation voluntary. The findings are unsurprisingly muted – while the study identifies some effects on savings, there are no improvements in financial knowledge, test scores, or social and psychological measures.

Another experiment is a study among 17 to 19 year old high school students in Italy by Becchetti et al. (2011), covering 944 students in 36 classes. The authors offered a 16 hour long course on finance over three months. Difference-in-difference estimates show no statistically significant effect on financial knowledge. Instead, both the treatment and control groups show improved knowledge over time, suggesting that students adapt to repeated financial literacy tests. Becchetti and Pisani (2012) extend the sample to 3,820 students in 118 classes. They now detect positive effects of the course on financial knowledge in a difference-and-difference analysis. Surprisingly, however, treatment group students already performed better on the financial knowledge test before the course, raising questions about the implementation of the random assignment. The paper does not examine effects on financial behavior or attitudes.

Against the state of the existing literature on high school financial education, our study fills an important gap by bringing together: (1) a randomized evaluation methodology, (2) a comprehensive financial education intervention that was mandatory for students and lasted 3 semesters over 17 months, (3) a very large sample size (868 schools and nearly 20,000 students), (4) widespread coverage over six states in Brazil, (5) a measure of financial knowledge that changes from survey to survey to avoid remembered answers, while still being comparable over time, (6) studying impacts on financial behavior, (7) a unique set of measures of financial attitudes and preferences developed specifically for the youth segment of the population, (8) analysis of “trickle-up” effects for parents, and (9) estimating the additional effects of a complementary workshop for parents. As such, our study offers new insights into the impact of financial education for youth and their parents.

# **2.2. The Brazilian Context**

Brazil has a relatively low national saving rate of around 16 percent of GDP and levels of financial awareness are also low. For example, a survey conducted by the _Instituto Data Popular_ in 2008 found that 82 percent of Brazilian consumers were unaware of the interest rate when borrowing money. To address these issues, policy makers set up a working group consisting of 7