Understanding the Financial Knowledge Gap: A New Dimension of Inequality in Later Life

ABSTRACT

To understand individuals’ financial behaviors, it is important to understand the financial knowledge gap – the distance between one’s objective and subjective financial knowledge. Overestimating one’s financial knowledge can lead to risky financial behaviors. To date, limited empirical work has examined how financial knowledge gap varies across age groups. We analyze the size and nature of the financial knowledge gap and its variation across age groups. Using nationally representative data, we find robust evidence that older adults overestimate their financial knowledge. Social workers can assess the financial knowledge gap and educate their clients to protect from financial fraud, exploitation, and abuse.     

Factors related to the intention to have additional children in the United States: A reanalysis of data from the 1965 and 1970 national fertility studies

Reproductive intentions of white mothers with no more than three children in 1965 and in 1970 were analyzed for their stability and change with respect to such factors as parity, age of the youngest child, wife’s employment, and husband’s education. Parity and age of the youngest child were found to have a much more important effect on the intent to have additional children than were such socioeconomic variables as wife’s employment and husband’s education. Parity and the interval since the latest birth (or the age of the youngest child) were found to have a nonlinear effect and to interact in affecting the reproductive intention. This suggests a convergence to a twochild family as the threshold size and that the length of childspacing is contingent on the parity. Change during 1965–1970 in this direction was found to be greater among mothers with husbands having college or higher educations.     

Risk level assessment and occupational health insurance expenditure: a gender imbalance

It is tested whether occupational risk explains differences in reimbursements from occupational-injury insurance schemes in relation to socioeconomic differences in all municipalities in Stockholm county, Sweden. An occupational risk level is formed, which considered the proportions of workers in various industrial sectors and the probability of a worker being injured in each. A regression analysis is performed, treating socioeconomic condition and risk level as predictors of reimbursement. After controlling for variation in socioeconomic factors, occupational-risk level explains the pattern of payments to men but not to women. From a gender perspective, it can be concluded that women, as a group, are not compensated for their occupational risks to the same extent as men.     

The im/mobilities of ‘sometimes-migrating’ for abortion: Ireland to Great Britain

ABSTRACT

This paper furthers the concept of im/mobilities through an investigation of the reproductive mobilities of women migrating for abortion from Ireland (north and south) to Great Britain. Where more often the focus of reproductive mobilities concerns the movement of people and matter in order to reproduce, there is less (although some) attention to movement aligned with the prevention of reproduction. We consider the variegated im/mobilities of conception not brought to birth, in the frictional movement of people, things, ideologies and imaginations in staying with and moving beyond the dichotomy of mobility and immobility. We engage in transdisciplinary dialogue between mobilities and migration studies. Hence, underlying this exploration is the concept of the ‘sometimes-migrant’, used to challenge binary oppositions between mobility and immobility, broader conceptualisations of ‘migrants’ as ‘exceptional’, and more specifically the notion of travelling for abortion as ‘abortion-tourism’. We adopt the call to focus on different incarnations of the ‘sometimes-migrant’ in the form of women travelling temporarily across national borders of intermittent porosity in order to seek care that is not available in their own country. Intersections of migration and mobilities reveal the ways women are im/mobilised through geopolitical and cultural practices at local and global scales.     

Building Financial Knowledge Is Not Enough: Financial Self-Efficacy as a Mediator in the Financial Capability of Low-Income Families

ABSTRACT

Policymakers in many countries have taken an interest in population-level financial capability. Limited empirical work has examined how constructs that makeup financial capability relate and how they function for individuals with low incomes. Using a national sample of low-income Canadians, we investigate relationships between financial knowledge, financial self-efficacy, and savings outcomes. Overall, we find that financial self-efficacy fully mediated the relationship between objective financial knowledge and postsecondary-education saving. The association between objective financial knowledge and retirement saving and emergency saving passed through financial self-efficacy. Efforts to promote financial capability need to focus on more than objective financial knowledge.     

Globalization and the Quality of Government: an Analysis of the Relationship

This research seeks to investigate the relationship between globalization and the quality of government. By using the Quality of Government Institute data, the paper analyzes the relationships between globalization and the government quality. The paper uses both KOF scores and the scores by the Heritage Foundation to measure globalization. The results show that economic and political globalization is a significant predictor of the quality of government. When all the variables on economic freedom are taken into consideration, fiscal, business and trade freedoms are critical factors influencing the quality of governance.     

ß-expectation tolerance region for the heteroscedastic multiple regression model with multivariate Student-t error

A ß-expectation tolerance region has been constructed for the multivariate regression model with heteroscedastic errors which follow a multivariate Student-t distribution with an unknown number of degrees of freedom. The ß-expectaion tolerance region obtained in this paper is optimal in the sense of having minimum enclosure among all such tolerance regions that guarantees that it would cover any preassigned proportions, namely, ß×100 percent of the future responses from the model.