Interviewer Effects and the Measurement of Financial Literacy

• Activity Number: 661
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 4, 2016 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Survey Research Methods Section
• Author(s): Panagiota Tzamourani* and Thomas F. Crossley and Tobias Schmidt and Joachim Winter
• Companies: Deutsche Bundesbank and University of Essex/Institute of Fiscal Studies and Deutsche Bundesbank and University of Munich
• Keywords: financial literacy ; interviewer effects ; measurement error

Abstract

In this paper we ask whether interviewer characteristics influence the answers to a standard set of financial literacy questions. Interviewers are particularly relevant as a potential source of response bias in the case of financial literacy because, unusually, they know the answers to the questions. We use data from Germany's wealth survey "The Panel on Household Finance" ("PHF") to investigate this issue. We find interviewer fixed effects explain a substantial fraction of the variance of the financial literacy score. Interviewer effects are related to interviewer's age, gender and education. We show how either interviewer identifiers or an estimate of the intra-interviewer correlation in financial literacy can be used to improve estimates of the effects of financial literacy.