The paper documents a positive association between political participation,
measured by the number of citizens voting at national elections, and awareness
of the tradeoffs behind both private and public decisions that indicators of basic
financial education can capture. The association is robust to the inclusion of a
range of controls, stronger for the most difficult concepts of risk diversification
and interest compounding, and consistent with the hypothesis that in countries
where financial education is higher due to national cultural traits, voter turnout
at national elections is higher.