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Working Paper
Money savvy youth: evaluating the effectiveness of financial education for fourth and fifth graders
While there are studies on the impact of financial education on teens, there is a lack of research on programs targeted at elementary school-aged youth. To address this gap, we evaluated the effectiveness of Money Savvy Youth (MSY), a financial education program for fourth and fifth graders, developed by the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation. MSY training was delivered in the classroom once a week over the course of five weeks during the 2011-2012 school year, and targeted a diverse and primarily low-income student population attending public schools in the Oakland Unified School ...
Working Paper
Money in a Mobile Age: Emerging Trends in Consumers’ Financial Practices
Consumer finance practices globally are undergoing a transformation due to the increased mobility of people and the technologization of finance. This increasing mobility has the potential to deliver both positive and negative effects for consumers. On the one hand, it can expand consumer choice, increase access to product information, assist with financial literacy, and improve security. On the other hand, it may increase certain social and economic issues, such as fraud, user errors, learning difficulties, stress, and financial mismanagement. This paper discusses a range of issues that ...
Working Paper
Bank accounts and youth financial knowledge: connecting experience and education
Studies have shown that ?experiential learning? can result in significant knowledge gains in a number of subject areas, but how does ?learning by doing? fit into the context of financial education? This new working paper explores this topic and analyzes data from the 2008 Jump$tart survey of high school seniors to examine the relationship between bank account ownership and student knowledge of personal finance. The results are informative for financial education delivery, particularly the importance of providing interactive opportunities for the application and practice of skills and ...
Working Paper
Neighborhood Change and Residential Instability in Oakland
Affordable housing is critical to ensuring healthy and resilient communities and broad access to economic opportunity. In this report, we examine neighborhood change and residential instability in the City of Oakland over the past two decades. We employ multiple data sources, including individual-level data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Consumer Credit Panel/Equifax data. We analyze historical and contemporary data to understand patterns of residential instability, and we identify which residents and areas are most likely to experience heightened challenges in the context of the ...
Working Paper
What can we do to help? Adopting age-friendly banking to improve financial well-being for older adults
This paper explores age-friendly banking products and services that better protect and preserve the assets of an aging population. In order to examine the unique financial needs and increase the financial well-being of low-income older adults, the California Coalition for Rural Housing (CCRH) partnered with the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) to conduct an intensive study of over 400 low-income tenants living in subsidized senior housing. CCRH and NCRC recommend that banks develop more affordable banking products for seniors on fixed-incomes, assist customers in applying for ...
Working Paper
The enduring challenge of concentrated poverty in America: case study of Fresno, California
This report is an expanded version of a case study that appeared as one of 16 community profiles published in ?The Enduring Challenge of Concentrated Poverty in America: Case Studies from Communities Across the U.S.,? a joint project of the Community Affairs Offices of the Federal Reserve System and the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. The intent of this publication is not to explain poverty causation; poor people, and the communities they live in, have been the subject of serious study and debate for decades. Rather, our goal is to add texture to our understanding of ...
Working Paper
Peer-to-peer lending and community development finance
Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks directly connect computer users online. Popular P2P platforms include eBay and Craigslist, for example, which have transformed the market for used consumer goods in recent years. Increasingly popular, however, are P2P lending sites that facilitate debt transactions by directly connecting borrowers and lenders on the Internet. In the summer of 2008, the Center for Community Development Investments assembled a working group of community development leaders, investors, and Prosper Marketplace, the largest P2P lending platform in the world, to discuss the potential ...
Working Paper
Leveraging the power of place: using pay for success to support housing mobility
Families who use housing vouchers to move from areas of concentrated poverty to better-resourced neighborhoods have been shown to experience higher earnings and improved health. Housing mobility programs increase the effectiveness of housing vouchers by providing education and support to voucher holders facing barriers to such ?opportunity? moves. This working paper proposes using a Pay for Success financing mechanism to increase investment in housing mobility programs based on the hypothesis that health care savings stemming from a positive mobility outcome?specifically related to diabetes ...
Working Paper
Lending in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods in California: the performance of CRA lending during the subprime meltdown
The current scale of mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures - particularly in the subprime market - has sparked a renewed debate over the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and the regulations governing home mortgage lending. On one side, detractors argue that the CRA helped to precipitate the current crisis by encouraging lending in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods (Walker 2008). On the other side, advocates of the CRA point to a number of reasons why the regulation shouldn?t be blamed for the current subprime crisis. ; What has been missing in this debate has been an empirical ...
Working Paper
Strengthening financial education in California: Expanding personal finance training among youth
Cross explores multiple options for expanding personal finance training among youth in California, including statewide legislation or education code changes for financial education, professional development and training for teachers on personal finance concepts, and school district adoption of financial preparedness curriculum.