Closing the financial capability gender gap: Cross-national evidence on general and gender-targeted interventions a pre-registered report

A persistent gender gap in financial capability continues to disadvantage girls and women in their long-term economic outcomes. This pre-registered study examines whether national education programs designed to improve mathematics proficiency and/or financial literacy and especially those that explicitly target girls are effective at narrowing the gender gap in financial capability. Using eight waves of PISA data (2000−2022) across multiple countries, we construct a Financial Capability Index (FCI) that extends beyond knowledge-based financial literacy to capture attitudes, behaviors, and engagement with financial decisions following Xiao et al. (2014, 2015). We exploit the staggered cross-national introduction of general and gender-targeted programs as quasi-exogenous shocks in a difference-in-differences framework, estimating both country-level and student-level specifications. Country and year fixed effects absorb time-invariant country characteristics and global shocks respectively, GDP per capita growth rate is used as a time-varying country-level control and triple-difference estimates allow us to test for heterogeneous treatment effects across socioeconomic groups. We hypothesize that gender-targeted programs reduce the gender gap in financial capability, while the specific socioeconomic groups and the maternal contribution to financial skill are treated as an open empirical question. This study provides the first causal cross-national evidence on which program types close the financial capability gender gap, for whom, and under what institutional and cultural conditions. Our results aim to provide direct evidence for policymakers designing interventions to improve women's financial wellbeing.