Lukas Menkhoff’s research while affiliated with Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and other places

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Publications (289)


Scaling Financial Education Among Micro-Entrepreneurs: A Randomized Saturation Experiment
  • Preprint
  • File available

October 2024

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30 Reads

Jana S Hamdan

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Lukas Menkhoff

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Yuanwei Xu

We study the effects of scaling up a financial- and business education program in a randomized saturation experiment in Uganda. We randomly assign the program at the cluster-level, and then randomize the share of treated individuals within treated clusters. 15 months later, we find that treated entrepreneurs are more likely to use mobile money savings accounts and payments, increase their mobile money and bank savings at the intensive and extensive margins, and invest more. We find little evidence of spillovers on untreated peers, but as the share of treated entrepreneurs increases, beneficial effects on the treated decline.

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Histogram for the willingness to take financial risk from 0 to 10 (left) and kernel density estimate for (winsorized) profits per worker and absolute profits (right)
Regressing profits (per worker) on risk tolerance, linear, and quadratic fit
Regressing profits per worker on risk tolerance, survivors vs non-survivors
Regressing profits per worker on risk tolerance separately for different ages
The non-linear impact of risk tolerance on entrepreneurial profit and business survival

August 2024

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21 Reads

Small Business Economics

Entrepreneurs tend to be risk tolerant but is higher risk tolerance always better? In a sample of about 2100 small businesses, we find an inverted U-shaped relation between risk tolerance and profitability. This relationship holds in a simple bilateral regression, and even after controlling for a large set of individual and business characteristics. Apparently, one major transmission goes from risk tolerance via investments to profits. This is quite robust as it applies for both past and planned investments. Considering business survival, we show, first, that less profitable businesses leave the market while moderately risk tolerant entrepreneurs survive more often. Second, the high risk-low profit part of the U-shaped relation seems to disappear among businesses being 4 years and older, indicating that such inferior risk-profit combinations disappear over time. These findings are important for the concept of business readiness trainings as the motivation (and ability) to take risks should potentially be accompanied by some warning that taking too much risk can be detrimental to long-term business success.


Earn More Tomorrow: Overconfidence, Income Expectations, and Consumer Indebtedness

May 2024

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4 Reads

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1 Citation

Journal of Money Credit and Banking

This paper examines whether biased income expectations due to overconfidence lead to higher levels of debt taking. We show suggestive evidence for a link between overconfidence and borrowing behavior in a representative survey of German households (German Socio‐Economic Panel–Innovation Sample [GSOEP‐IS]). This motivates a laboratory experiment to study causality behind these effects. In two experiments, participants can purchase goods by borrowing against their future income. We exogenously manipulate overconfidence about income expectations by letting income depend on relative performance in hard and easy quiz tasks. In the main experiment, we successfully generate biased income expectations and show that participants with higher income expectations initially borrow more. Overconfident participants scale back their consumption after income feedback. However, they remain in higher debt at the end of the experiment, which has real financial consequences. In a robustness experiment, we rule out that overborrowing is driven by low prices of goods. Even though the expected income manipulation works less well in this experiment, debt‐taking behavior is very similar and correlates with income expectations and overconfidence.







The Non-linear Impact of Risk Tolerance on Entrepreneurial Profit and Business Survival

January 2024

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75 Reads

Entrepreneurs tend to be risk tolerant but is more risk tolerance always better? In a sample of about 2,100 small businesses, we find an inverted U-shaped relation between risk tolerance and profitability. This relationship holds in a simple bilateral regression and also when we control for a large set of individual and business characteristics. Apparently, one major transmission goes from risk tolerance via investments to profits. This is quite robust as it applies for past investments as well as planned investments. Considering business survival, we show, first, that less profitable businesses leave the market while moderately risk tolerant entrepreneurs survive more often. Second, the high risk-low profit part of the U-shaped relation seems to disappear among businesses being four years and older, indicating that such inferior risk-profit combinations disappear over time. These findings are important for the concept of business readiness trainings as the motivation (and ability) to take risks should potentially be accompanied by some warning that too much risk taking can be detrimental to long-term business success.


Fremde Welt: Nur eine Minderheit teilt Deutschlands „Werte“

August 2023

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7 Reads

Wirtschaftsdienst

Countries in the world need cooperation to solve global problems, and Germany with its strongly outward-oriented economy has a particular interest in world-wide cooperation. The generally accepted human rights seem to provide a solid ground for this, but at a closer look, the area of generally shared values is much smaller. In particular, Germany with its moral concepts is not representative of the world. This applies to several values and consequently can also be seen in aggregated analyses. The number of partners sharing the same values is rare beyond Europe.


Citations (31)


... We used the findings of previous studies to infer and validate our findings. For example, studies have shown that overconfidence, a cognitive bias, often results in suboptimal economic behaviors such as excessive market entry and overborrowing [51,52]. These biases can affect an individual's ability to rationally assess the long-term consequences of financial decisions. ...

Reference:

Navigating Time-Inconsistent Behavior: The Influence of Financial Knowledge, Behavior, and Attitude on Hyperbolic Discounting
Earn More Tomorrow: Overconfidence, Income Expectations, and Consumer Indebtedness
  • Citing Article
  • May 2024

Journal of Money Credit and Banking

... Mishra (2018) identified financial and investment awareness as the key boundaries to participation. In Tanzania, there is a mixed picture; previously, Noel (2013) found out that financial literacy in Tanzania has a small impact on stock market participation among academicians. ...

Determinants of Stock Market Participation
  • Citing Article
  • January 2024

SSRN Electronic Journal

... Regarding the mechanisms underlying behavior change in response to financial education interventions, several evaluations of financial education programs have been found to have causal effects on time preferences (i.e., patience and time-inconsistency) and the quality of intertemporal decision-making (i.e., choice consistency), especially on the young (Alan and Ertac 2018;Bover et al. 2018;Lührmann et al. 2018;Sutter et al. 2020;Kaiser et al. 2023b). ...

Is Patience Malleable Via Educational Intervention? Evidence on the Role of Age in Field Experiments

SSRN Electronic Journal

... Ferner geht es beim Werteindex um Einstellungen der Menschen und nicht die der Politiker:innen. Trotz dieser Einschränkungen ist der gewählte Werteindex positiv mit einem breiten Demokratieindex, den die Weltbank ermittelt, korreliert(Menkhoff, 2022). Abbildung 5 zeigt diesen Zusammenhang für die erfassten Länder, der Spearman-Korrelationskoeffizient beträgt 0,78 und ist statistisch hoch signifikant.Abgesehen von den Top-10-Demokratien, gemäß Weltbank-Index, die alle auch einen sehr hohen Werteindex aufweisen, ist der Zusammenhang allerdings nicht ganzAbbildung 4 Verteilung der Werteindizes weltweit Summe des Survival und Traditional Index nach Land Quelle: European Values Study and World Values Survey: Joint EVS/WVS 2017-2022 Dataset. ...

Kleine Welt: Wenn Deutschland nur mit Demokratien handelt

Wirtschaftsdienst

... Pembelajaran yang telah menerapkan active learning ditandai dengan indicator sebagai berikut, (1) situasi tetap terkendali meskipun selama proses pembelajaran berlangsung siswa ditantang melakukan kegiatan pembelajaran secara bebas dalam menentukan materi yang akan dipelajari, guru mempertimbangkan kebutuhan dan karakteristik siswa, (2) guru lebih banyak memberi stimulasi berpikir tingkat tinggi pada siswa untuk memecahkan masalah yang diberikan, dengan begitu guru tidak begitu mendominasi selama kegiatan pembelajaran namun siswa sendiri yang selalu aktif membangun pengetahuan mereka sendiri, sehingga pembelajaran akan lebih mudah diserap oleh siswa, (3) kegiatan pembelajaran berlangsung dengan ragam variasi, disesuaikan dengan kebutuhan dan karakteristik siswa. Karena pembelajaran yang bervariasi tidak akan membuat siswa bosan, (4) keberanian siswa untuk mengajukan pendapat melalui pertanyaan, pernyataan, dialog, dan diskusi yang didesain dengan sengaja oleh guru untuk melatih kepercayaan diri siswa (Frame dkk., 2015; Kaiser & Menkhoff, 2022a). ...

Active Learning Improves Financial Education: Experimental Evidence from Uganda

Journal of Development Economics

... In financial education programs, the null hypothesis assumes that the intervention does not affect the financial knowledge and other financial outcomes such as attitudes, self-efficacy, and the behavior of the people subjected to the treatment (Miller et al. 2015). For example, Kaiser and Menkhoff (2019), in an updated meta-analysis of experimental studies of school financial education programs, found that financial education treatments have, on average, sizeable impacts on financial knowledge among students, although smaller effects on financial behaviors. Kaiser and Menkhoff (2019) only found 18 interventions using randomized control trials (RCTs) and focused on financial education in schools. ...

Financial Education in Schools: A Meta-Analysis of Experimental Studies
  • Citing Article
  • January 2018

SSRN Electronic Journal

... The intervention provides information about mobile money as a savings-technology and about mobile money transfers (see Suri, 2017). While there is lot of evidence showing the impact of mobile money on risk sharing, household welfare and financial inclusion (e.g., Jack and Suri, 2014;Munyegera and Matsumoto, 2016;Riley, 2018;Hamdan et al., 2022), and also some evidence on more recently introduced mobile money products (Bharadwaj et al., 2021;Annan et al., 2024), there is little explicit evidence on the success of addressing mobile money in a financial education training. Chiwaula et al. (2020) combine a financial literacy and mobile money training with reminders among community savers in Malawi, finding a positive effect on mobile money savings four months after the intervention. ...

Mobile Money, Financial Inclusion, and Unmet Opportunities. Evidence from Uganda

The Journal of Development Studies

... No correspondente ás disparidades sociais, a literatura amosa como a pandemia non afectou de forma homoxénea, existindo colectivos cunhas características determinadas que sufriron as consecuencias en maior medida. Os principais factores tras unha maior incidencia da pandemia parecen ser un menor nivel de formación (Farré et al., 2022;Immel et al., 2022;Menkhoff & Schröder, 2022;Qian & Fan, 2020), ser autoempregados (Immel et al., 2022;Qian & Fan, 2020), unha baixa intensidade no emprego (Hidalgo-Pérez, 2022), a capacidade para traballar de forma non presencial (Bonacini et al., 2021), o sexo 3 (Dang & Viet Nguyen, 2021;Farré et al., 2022;Salido, 2021), pertencer a un fogar de renda baixa (Immel et al., 2022;Menkhoff & Schröder, 2022;Qian & Fan, 2020), pertencer a un fogar no que o sustentador principal é unha persoa nova (CoSano, 2021;de la Rica et al., 2022;Immel et al., 2022), pertencer a un fogar cun sustentador principal de idade avanzada (Menkhoff & Schröder, 2022), vivir no ámbito rural (Qian & Fan, 2020) e non ser propietarios de vivenda (Módenes, 2022). ...

Risky Asset Holdings During Covid‐19 and their Distributional Impact: Evidence from Germany

Review of Income and Wealth

... Exploring the concept of sustainable consumption at the personal level is a key component of financial literacy. The relationship between household finances and financial well-being often centers around debt management, and studies have shown that financial education programs can have a positive impact on financial knowledge and behaviors (Kaiser et al. 2022, Zhang & Chatterjee, 2023. This underscores the significance of understanding personal finance to secure a stable financial future. ...

Financial education affects financial knowledge and downstream behaviors

Journal of Financial Economics

... Firstly, our analysis showed that while high and medium-high digital intensity sectors had better stock market performance than low and medium-low digital intensity sectors, they also experienced higher variance and volatility, leading to increased uncertainty in the stock market, which is detrimental to resilience (Liu et al., 2020a). Menkhoff and Schröder (2022) also show that higher income households in Germany benefit more from dynamic stock markets, and are less prone to health and unemployment risks, than lower income households due to their larger participation in the stock market and greater flexibility in rebalancing their wealth portfolios. This heterogeneity tends to widen the wealth gap between low and high income groups in the crisis. ...

Risky Asset Holdings during Covid-19 and Their Distributional Impact: Evidence from Germany
  • Citing Article
  • January 2021

SSRN Electronic Journal