Adult Financial Literacy Financial Forum: "Assessing Financial Literacy and Why It Matters"
Networks Financial Institute (NFI) hosted "Assessing Financial Literacy and Why It Matters" as part of their ongoing "Financial Forum Series."
This day-long conference held Tuesday, March 28, 2006 at the Columbia Club (121 Monument Circle) in downtown Indianapolis, featured Keynote Speaker, Paul Solman, Business and Economics Correspondent for WGBH, Boston and PBS and a distinguished panel of experts addressing a number of key questions pertaining to adult financial literacy, including:
- What do consumers know about the financial requirements of daily life, financial services opportunities and how to make effective decisions?
- What should every adult know or be able to do in order to consider themselves financially literate and to make sound decisions?
- What are the obstacles to being truly financially literate in our increasingly complex society?
- What financial service opportunities are available to low-income or financially unsophisticated consumers? Is better regulation of these high-cost lending sources needed?
Agenda Highlights
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Panel Opening Statements : What Is Financial Literacy, How Is It Assessed and Why Does It Matter?
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Audience Discussion (Questions and Answers)
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Panel Discussion
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Audience Discussion (Questions and Answers)
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Panelist Summaries
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Lunch Keynote Speaker Paul Solman, Business and Economics Correspondent for WGBH, Boston and PBS.
Financial Literacy: How to Save Safely for an Uncertain Future
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Papers on Financial Services Available for low-income/ low-literacy adults
* Payday Lending in Colorado presented by Robert DeYoung of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Ronnie J. Phillips of Colorado State University
* Consumers' Use of New and Traditional Suppliers of High-Cost Credit presented by Gregory Ellihausen of Georgetown University
* Payday Lending: the Demographics of Store Location and Loan Activity presented by Kathryn Samolyk of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (co-author Mark Flannery, University of Florida)
Speaker Bios
Zvi Bodie, Boston University
Zvi Bodie is Professor of Finance and Economics at Boston University School of Management. He holds a Ph.D from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has served on the finance faculty at the Harvard Business School and MIT's Sloan School of Management. Professor Bodie has published widely on pension finance and investment strategy in leading professional journals. His books include Foundations of Pension Finance, Pensions in the U.S. Economy, Issues in Pension Economics, and Financial Aspects of the U.S. Pension System. His textbook Investments is the market leader and is used in the certification programs of the Financial Planning Association and the Society of Actuaries. His textbook Finance is coauthored by Nobel Prize winning economist, Robert C. Merton. Professor Bodie is a member of the Pension Research Council of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. His latest book is Worry Free Investing: A Safe Approach to Achieving Your Lifetime Financial Goals.
John Caskey, Swarthmore College
John P. Caskey is a professor of economics at Swarthmore College. He received his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. For over a decade, his research has focused on the use of the financial services by lower-income U.S. households and on community development financial institutions. Professor Caskey has served as a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal), and Yale University. He has also worked as a consultant for the the Filene Research Insititute, the Ford Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, the Walton Family Foundation, and the World Bank. In addition to his academic work, Professor Caskey serves on the Boards of Directors of the Chester Community Improvement Project, a non-profit low-income housing development agency, and the Franklin Mint Federal Credit Union.
Robert DeYoung, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
Robert DeYoung is Associate Director of Insurance and Research for the bank research and regulatory policy groups at the FDIC in Washington, D.C. Previously, he was a senior economist and economic advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. His research focuses on the evolution of financial markets and the performance of the firms that operate in those markets. His articles and commentaries on these topics have appeared in numerous academic and industry publications. Before joining the Federal Reserve in 1998, Mr. DeYoung was a senior financial economist at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and a Joyce Foundation Teaching Fellow at Beloit College. He teaches graduate finance classes at DePaul University, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Financial Services Research and the Journal of Economics and Business. Mr. DeYoung holds a B.A. from Rutgers University-Camden and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Gregory Elliehausen, Georgetown University
Gregory Elliehausen is Senior Research Scholar at the Credit Research Center in the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. Dr. Elliehausen specializes in the economics of markets for mortgage and consumer credit. His current research activities include investigations of demand for consumer credit, use of information in consumers’ credit decisions, determinants of delinquency and bankruptcy, and the regulation of subprime credit markets. Dr. Elliehausen has been a member of the staff of the Credit Research Center since 1998. Before joining the Credit Research Center, Dr. Elliehausen was an economist on the staff of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. He conducted research and prepared analyses on the effects of financial regulations, especially consumer protection regulations for financial services. He was involved in the design and implementation of major data collection projects, including the Survey of Consumer Finances and the Survey of Small Business Finances. Dr. Elliehausen has presented papers at numerous academic conferences and published articles in the Antitrust Review, Business Economics, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Services Research, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics, and Review of Income and Wealth. Dr. Elliehausen has a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the Pennsylvania State University.
Robert Lerman, American University and Urban Institute
Robert I. Lerman is Professor of Economics at American University and a Senior Fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC. He earned his A.B. from Brandeis University in 1965 and his PhD in Economics from MIT in 1970. He has both research and policy experience dealing with a range of social policies. In the 1970s, he worked on reforming the nation’s income maintenance programs and on youth employment policies as staff economist for both the Congressional Joint Economic Committee and the U.S. Department of Labor.
Dr. Lerman’s research deals primarily with factors influencing poverty and income inequality and the policies aimed at reducing these problems. He has published estimates of the impacts of changing family structure and of recent immigration on poverty and inequality in the US. He was one of the first scholars to examine the patterns and economic determinants of unwed fatherhood and to propose a youth apprenticeship strategy in the U.S. His research has appeared in monographs, book chapters, and in a variety of journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Human Resources, Economica, National Tax Journal, and Review of Income and Wealth. His current studies deal with asset building among low-income families, on the interaction between marital stability and earnings, and with the impact of public and private initiatives to strengthen marriage. He has served on the Board of Editors for Youth and Society and on a National Academy of Sciences panel examining the nation’s post-secondary education and training system for the work place.
Annamaria Lusardi, Dartmouth College
Annamaria Lusardi is an Associate Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College. She is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the Technical Review Committee for the Bureau of Labor Statistics' National Longitudinal Surveys Program. Professor Lusardi’s main area of research are saving and consumption behavior, Social Security and pension, and macroeconomics. She has worked with both US and international data. She is the author of numerous articles analyzing the impact of risk on wealth accumulation, the effects of liquidity constraints on occupational choice, the importance of planning costs, the effects of financial literacy and financial education, and the behavior of saving across countries.
Dr. Lusardi received her Ph.D. degree in Economics from Princeton University. Previously, she won a research fellowship from the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago and a junior faculty fellowship from the John. M. Olin Foundation. Her research has been supported by several institutions, such the National Institute on Aging, the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Labor, TIAA-CREF, and the Social Security Administration via the University of Michigan Retirement Research Center and the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
Lewis Mandell, State University of New York, Buffalo
Lewis Mandell is Professor of Finance and Managerial Economics, and former Dean of the School of Management at SUNY Buffalo. He began his career at the University of Michigan where he ran the nationwide Survey of Consumer Finances and developed his lifelong interest in consumer financial literacy and behavior. In addition to his academic career, he served as Director of Research for the U.S. Comptroller of the Currency in Washington D. C.
Lew’s published work focuses on financial literacy, financial behavior and consumer financial products. His articles have appeared in leading scholarly journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Journal of Finance and the Journal of Marketing Research. He was the founding editor of Financial Services Review the leading academic journal dealing with individual financial management. The latest of his 20 books, Financial Literacy: Are We Improving, was published in 2004 and summarizes the status of financial literacy among young Americans. His MoneySkill interactive, web-based textbook is distributed, without charge, to teachers and students at thousands of high schools and colleges in an effort to bring financial literacy to every student.
Lew is a board member of the Jumpstart Coalition, the American Financial Services Association Educational Foundation, the Delaware North Corporation and about 40 Metlife mutual funds and variable annuities. He also serves on the final steering committee for the new national examination in economics which will be administered by the Department of Education beginning in 2006. He was the recipient of the 2004 William E. Odem Visionary Leadership award in Financial Literacy, the highest award in the field.
Ronnie J. Phillips, Colorado State University
Ronnie J. Phillips is Professor of Economics at Colorado State University. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the FDIC, the Comptroller of the Currency, and at the Jerome Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. He is a past president of the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE). His publications on financial system issues have appeared in books, academic journals, newspapers, magazines and public policy briefs. Phillips holds a B.A. from the University of Oklahoma and a Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin.
Kathryn Samolyk, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
Katherine Samolyk is a senior economist in the Division of Insurance and Research at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. In support of the Corporation’s consumer protection and compliance examination responsibilities, Dr. Samolyk produces statistical analysis of potential fair lending violations and of government monitoring data used to identify institutions that are “at risk” of having such violations. More broadly, her research has focused on understanding the determinants of banking and financial sector conditions, the linkages between credit markets and the performance of the economy, small business financing issues, and the implications of bank consolidation for the provision of banking services. Recent projects include papers produced for the FDIC’s Future of Banking Study, research examining the implications of geographic diversification for bank performance, and a study of payday lending store costs and performance. Prior to joining the FDIC in 1996, Dr. Samolyk spent two years as a visiting economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and five years as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. While at the Federal Reserve Board, Dr. Samolyk worked on the production of the 1993 National Survey of Small Business Finance public-use data base and developed a methodology to utilize the micro business data to improve Flow of Funds account estimates for unincorporated firms. A native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Dr. Samolyk received her B.S. in economics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Paul Solman, Business and Economics Correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
Paul Solman has been business, economics and occasional art correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer since 1985.
The founding editor of the alternative Boston weekly The Real Paper (1972), Paul began his career in business journalism as a Nieman Fellow, studying at the Harvard Business school in 1976. He has been the business reporter at WGBH Boston since 1977 and was the co-originator and executive editor of PBS's business documentary series, Enterprise.
His reporting has won Emmys in the '70s, '80s and '90s and two Peabody awards, the most recent in 2004 for his reporting on the undercounting of unemployment
Paul has also served on the Harvard Business School faculty, teaching media, finance and business history. He co-authored a better-than-average-seller, Life and Death on the Corporate Battlefield (1983), which appeared in Japanese, German and a pirated Taiwanese edition. He lectures occasionally on college campuses, has written for numerous publications, including both Forbes and Mother Jones magazines, and was named a member of TV Guide's "Dream Team" of television reporters. A one-time cab driver, kindergarten teacher and management consultant, Paul is also the presenter for and author of "Discovering Economics with Paul Solman," a series of videos released in 2004 by McGraw-Hill to accompany the company's introductory economics textbooks.
Policy Briefs & Papers