Abstract

In public debate in Germany, it often is criticized that financial knowledge is insufficiently developed at secondary school. To determine the extent to which learning opportunities at secondary school influence young people’s financial knowledge we administered a German adaptation of the Test of Financial Literacy (TFL-G) to 984 students aged 17 to 25 beginning their higher education study programs in Germany and controlled for socioeconomic factors. We compared the content of the TFL-G to the curricula of selected regular and vocational secondary schools and found significant differences across federal states. Our results indicate that attending an economics class at a regular secondary school had a moderate effect on the development of financial knowledge of the participants in our sample whereas completing a vocational training program at the secondary school level had a much greater effect. In view of our results, the question arises as to whether more importance should be given in the curriculum of regular secondary schools in Germany to developing financial knowledge.