Financial Responsibility, Personality Traits and Financial Decision ...

chance construct score. As discussed before, both measure the belief of respondents to
capture how much their actions affect their own financial wellbeing versus their belief
that their future is determined more by faith than by themselves. These measures
capture the extent to which individuals are willing to take on the responsibility of
financial decisions by their own accord. Instead of looking at the levels of each, it is
more interesting to directly focus on the differences between the sub groups. We find
that this locus of financial control is higher amongst savers, while the chance score is
higher for spenders. In both cases these differences are statistically significant and in
line with expectations. Savers would save less if they thought that it was chance that
would determine their futures.
Table 2— Correlation table (n=1,721)
Obviously, some of these characteristics of our respondents are related. Hence, be-
fore we take our dataset any further we first consider the correlation coefficients given
in table 2. Beyond some obvious relationships between items like the number of chil-
dren and household size, age of respondents and their distribution across generations,
we also document some correlations that require our attention. For instance, for older
respondents, political inclination and religious belief increases, as well as the belief in
external factors. However older people are less positive about the economy. This may
be driven by the generation born before the war, which we will control for later. Male
respondents are higher risk takers, which is well documented in the literature. However,
they also take greater internal control for their finances. Indeed risk taking is statis-
tically positively correlated with taking financial control, and with degree of financial
literacy, the extent to which this is driven by male respondents and other factors will be
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