Financial Responsibility, Personality Traits and Financial Decision ...

savers, the only interaction effect that generates a significant result is on the savings
behavior of parents. If parents saved for your own college education, you will be less
inclined (later in life) to let faith withhold you from saving for your own future.
To what extent is the locus of control construct a consequence of a persons position
rather than the determining factor in the position? Is the build up in savings due to
a more externally chance driven fate motive? Or does the fact that one believes in
fate result in an external locus of control? Is the belief a result of a cause of a persons
position in society? In view of the above criticism it is interesting to look at upbringing.
If financial responsibility is taught during upbringing then we should observe a high
influence of parents saving behavior on the offspring.
4 Conclusions
To what extent do households save and why do some households save? These are two
questions, which have been at the heart of the economics literature for many decades.
In this paper blend three elements for work on life-cycle models, financial literacy,
and the psychology of the internal locus of control to help shed some greater light on
answering these questions. We construct survey questions with which we measure the
financial literacy of our respondents a set of 1,721 Dutch households. Our survey
puts us in the unique position to be able to simultaneously analyze and weigh the
effects of household demographics, skills and interests and furthermore personality and
upbringing, over and above the influence of financial literacy, which has already been
studied on financial decision making. Our results are both intriguing and intuitive at
the same time.
In the cross section we find that the self-reported savings behavior is more likely
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