Debt Attitudes in Gender Perspective: Is There an Effect of Debt Knowledge and Skills?

Abstract

The link between financial attitudes and financial market behaviour is well-documented. Yet, little is known about the role of financial knowledge and skills – i.e. main components of financial literacy – for shaping financial attitudes, especially from a gender perspective. Our study focuses on debt literacy and debt attitudes. We conducted a computer-assisted telephone interview on a representative sample of adult Poles (N=1,004), subsequently adopting latent class analysis to reveal their debt attitudes. Links between debt literacy and debt attitudes were studied with multinomial regression models. The results show that debt attitudes are diversified in Polish population and can be grouped into five classes having different attitude profiles. In some classes, the structure of debt attitudes is far from simple, unidimensional pro-debt / anti-debt construct. Although we did not find significant gender differences either in conceptualization of debt attitudes or in their drivers, we showed that in all but one class the attitudes are strongly linked either to debt knowledge or debt skills, or both. Debt skills were revealed as a particularly strong predictor of debt attitudes.

Keywords: debt attitudes, gender gap, debt literacy, debt knowledge, debt skills, financial literacy

JEL Classification: D12, D14, D91