actively discourage their use. Finally, administrative data showed that the program also increased the grade passing rate, i.e., led fewer students to have to repeat a school year.

We now study the effects of this high-school financial education program on students’ financial and labor market outcomes, up to nine years after the program ended (and students graduated from high school). Nine years after graduating high school, most students would have entered the labor market, even if they had gone to university. In Brazil, students tend to start university one or two years after graduating from high school (because students frequently use this time to study for entrance exams) and take between four and eight years to graduate.

Based on students’ name and age, we obtained the taxpayer identification number (CPF) for nearly 16,000 students in the original sample. The percentage of students for whom we found a CPF is 44.27 percent in the treatment group and 46.02 percent in the control group. The small difference in percentage of CPFs found across the treatment and control group is statistically significant at the 10 percent level. Nevertheless, the baseline characteristics from the 2010 survey are balanced across the treatment and control groups in the sample of 16,000 students with a CPF. We then use the CPF to consult administrative data housed at the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB). These data include bank account ownership (but not account balances), use of various credit products, as well as information on formal employment status and formal microenterprise ownership. We follow students until February 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit Brazil.<sup>2</sup> To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first study to present long-term evidence on the effectiveness of financial education via a large, randomized controlled trial, and to jointly analyze a diverse set of administrative records on long-term outcomes.

Relying on the comparison of the randomized treatment and control groups, we find no effect of the high-school financial education program on long-run bank account ownership, but a high percentage of students (85 percent) have a bank account after graduating high school. However, treatment students are significantly less likely to use credit than control students, particularly in the most expensive credit categories: credit cards and overdrafts. Treatment students are 1.4 percentage points less likely to have credit card debt<sup>3</sup> and 0.9 percentage point less likely to use overdrafts, compared to 23 percent of control students with credit card debt and 11 percent of control students with overdrafts. Both effects persist over time, that is, they are equally strong eight to nine years after the financial education program ended as they were five to seven years after the program.

Interestingly, the long-run effect on using expensive sources of credit is the opposite of the shortrun effect found in Bruhn et al. (2016). That is, in the short run, treatment students were more likely to use expensive sources of credit than control students, while treatment students are less likely than control students to use these sources in the long run. While we do not have further data to analyze mechanisms, we hypothesize that in the short-run, students experimented with expensive credit early and realized that this was not a sound financial decision. It is also likely that the credit they used while still in high school was only for small purchases, whereas in the long

> 2 We do not include data from the post-COVID-19 period in our analysis since the crisis likely altered the typical functioning of the credit and labor markets.

> 3 Revolving debt or installment plans to pay outstanding balances.

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