Martin Boyer et Pierre-Carl Michaud, Professors at HEC Montréal and CIRANO Fellows, and Philippe d’Astous, Professor at HEC Montréal, won the prestigious Financial Literacy Research Award at an international forum on financial education and literacy on April 11 and 12, in Washington.

They received the Financial Literacy Research Award for a research paper on the impact of a short financial education intervention on decisions concerning tax-sheltered retirement accounts.

The research is the result of an experiment conducted with three groups of Quebec and Ontario respondents ages 35 to 55. The first was a control group, while the other two received different levels of financial education, in video form. The respondents then had to answer questions testing their knowledge and the quality of their decisions concerning contributions to a TFSA or an RRSP. The results showed that the respondents who watched two informative videos improved their ability to make the right decisions by 8 to 10% in comparison with the control group. Consequently, the study found that brief financial education at the appropriate time can improve the quality of contribution decisions.