Tim Kaiser

Effects of Educational Interventions

In a current working paper, Tim Kaiser and his co-authors, Luis Oberrauch and Lukas Menkhoff, study the age-dependent malleability of time-preferences via educational interventions designed to foster financial decision-making capabilities and to induce a more future-oriented mindset. They conduct a field experiment covering both youths and adults in Uganda and aggregate evidence from earlier field experiments to study the generalizability of treatment effects. The results indicate heterogeneous treatment effects by age: more than one year later, adults’ patience and discount factors are unaffected by the intervention, but they find large effects on patience, estimated discount factors and field saving behavior for youth. The evidence aggregation suggests the results are generalizable across contexts. (IZA Discussion Paper No. 16399)

Mr. Kaiser’s research interests are in the area of Applied Microeconomics, especially the Economics of Education, Development Economics, and Household Finance. Much of his recent work studies the causal effects of financial education interventions in both developing and high-income economies on domain-specific cognitive and non-cognitive skills and field behaviors. His work has appeared in field journals such as the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Development Economics, and others.

During his stay at CESifo, Mr. Kaiser will work with Ludger Wößmann and Sarah Necker on a project concerned with the measurement and mapping of economic literacy in Germany. In addition, he will present results from a large-scale RCT evaluating a national information and awareness campaign on financial decision-making in Italy. The long-term project evaluated a national information and awareness campaign implemented in mainstream media via a randomized encouragement design.

Tim Kaiser is a Professor of Economics at the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau (RPTU) and an IZA Research Affiliate He is also associated with the Mannheim Institute for Financial Education (MIFE), a joint initiative of the University of Mannheim and ZEW, as well as with the Financial Literacy and Personal Finance Research Network (G53). Mr. Kaiser currently serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance (JBEF). He received his doctoral degree in Economics and Social Sciences from the University of Kiel and was a DIW postdoctoral Research Associate. His work has been mentioned in media outlets such as The New York Times, Fortune, The Washington Post, Forbes, The American Prospect, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Deutschlandfunk.