Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, United States of America.
School of Business and Economics, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
PLoS One. 2023 Jun 7;18(6):e0285199. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0285199. eCollection 2023.
The increasing complexity of the modern financial landscape presents significant challenges for individuals' financial well-being. In this study, we aim to investigate the relationship between cognitive ability and financial well-being by utilizing data from the British Cohort Study, which follows a sample of 13,000 individuals from birth in 1970 to the present day. Our objective is to examine the functional form of this relationship while controlling for factors such as childhood socio-economic status and adult income. Previous research has established a correlation between cognitive ability and financial well-being, but has implicitly assumed a linear relationship. Our analyses indicate that the majority of the relationships between cognitive ability and financial variables are monotonic. However, we also observe non-monotonic relationships, particularly for credit usage, suggesting a curvilinear relationship where both lower and higher levels of cognitive ability are associated with lower levels of debt. These findings have important implications for understanding the role of cognitive ability in financial well-being and for financial education and policy, as the complexity of the modern financial landscape poses significant challenges for individuals' financial well-being. As financial complexity is increasing and cognitive ability is a key predictor of knowledge acquisition, misspecifying the true relationship between cognitive ability and financial outcomes leads to an undervaluation of the role of cognitive ability for financial well-being.
现代金融格局的日益复杂性给个人的财务健康带来了重大挑战。在这项研究中，我们旨在利用英国队列研究的数据来研究认知能力与财务健康之间的关系，该研究从 1970 年出生至今一直跟踪了 13000 个人的样本。我们的目标是在控制童年社会经济地位和成年收入等因素的情况下，检验这种关系的函数形式。先前的研究已经建立了认知能力与财务健康之间的相关性，但隐含地假设了一种线性关系。我们的分析表明，认知能力与财务变量之间的大多数关系都是单调的。然而，我们也观察到了非单调关系，特别是对于信贷使用，这表明存在一种曲线关系，即较低和较高的认知能力水平都与较低的债务水平相关。这些发现对于理解认知能力在财务健康中的作用以及金融教育和政策具有重要意义，因为现代金融格局的复杂性给个人的财务健康带来了重大挑战。随着金融复杂性的增加，认知能力是知识获取的关键预测因素，因此，如果对认知能力与财务结果之间的真实关系进行错误指定，将导致对认知能力对财务健康的作用的低估。
