Unshrouding product-specific attributes through financial education

We present a welfare framework to evaluate the market effects of financial education interventions. Using this framework, we assess a new product-specific rules of thumb-driven consumer financial education program provided just before purchase decisions. While our intervention improves knowledge and outcomes for newly educated consumers, it is a Pareto-improvement only under a narrow set of conditions, as are other interventions in the literature. Our findings suggest that positive treatment effects for a small fraction of consumers may come at the cost of other uninformed consumers in retail financial markets, making positive effects necessary but not sufficient to adopt financial education policies.