Consumer Knowledge and Financial Decisions

There has been an increasing recognition that financial knowledge (i.e., literacy) is lacking across the population. Moreover, there is recognition that this lack of knowledge poses real problems as credit, mortgages, health insurance, retirement benefits, and savings and investment decisions become increasingly complex. Financial Decisions Across the Lifespan brings together the work of scholars from various disciplines (family and consumer sciences, economics, law, finance, sociology, and public policy) to provide a broad range of perspectives on financial knowledge, financial decisions, and policies. For consistency across the volume each chapter follows a similar format: (1) what individuals know or need to know (2) how what they know or need to know affects financial decisions and outcomes (3) ways in which policies or programs or financial innovations can enhance their knowledge, or decisions, or outcomes. Contributors will provide both new and existing research to create a valuable picture of the state of financial literacy and how it can be improved.

Douglas Lamdin is a professor of economics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He has also been a visiting professor of finance at the R.H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park. His teaching is primarily the introductory finance course, and the investments course (undergraduate and MBA). He has published more than 20 articles on financial economics and the economics of education in journals such as Journal of Family and Economic Issues, Journal of Regulatory Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics, Education Economics, and Contemporary Economic Policy. He edited The Managerial Economics Reader, Blackwell, 1994. He also serves on the editorial board of Business Economics, the journal of the National Association for Business Economics.