FINANCIAL LITERACY

OECD defines Financial Literacy as "a combination of awareness, knowledge, skill, attitude and behaviour necessary to make sound financial decisions and ultimately achieve individual financial wellbeing". Such a combination should be build around 4 thematic areas: "Money and transactions", "Planning and managing finances", "Risk and reward" and "Financial landscape". The Italian Parliament has recently taken measures to fill the gap and develop a "National Strategy for financial education", recognizing the need to improve the financial literacy of several groups of citizens.

a) Knowledge and understanding:
- knowing the terms commonly used to describe financial situation, issues and problems;
- knowing the functioning of basic financial products;
- understand the simple mechanics of interest rates, compounding, diversification. risk-reward trade-off.

b) Applying knowledge and understanding:
- ability to understand articles on financial issues (for example taken from newspapers and non-specialized press);
- ability to compute the underlying interest rate (or other convenient summaries) of simple financial operations like mortgages and consumer loans and makes sense of the numeric figure;
- ability to broadly assess the risk and rewards of some important asset classes and make sense of the legal documents provided by banks and other intermediaries.

c) Making judgements:
- ability to understand (some) relevant issues of everyday investments and comment on (some of) the advantages and drawbacks of financial products and individual allocations.

None, the course is elective and devoted exclusively to students who are not enrolled in economic or managerial degrees.

The course will cover (some of) the following topics, also depending on students' tastes:

(Financial) interest, present and future value
Annuities, mortgages, loans
Investing in stocks and related risks
Investing in bonds and related risks
Mutual funds, Exchange Traded Funds (ETF) and pension funds
intermediaries and legal documents (KIID)
Discussion of cases:

Lecture notes, guides of the Bank of Italy and reports by OECD and other financial institutions.
Optional readings (excerpts): "Introduzione alla matematica finanziaria". A. Basso e P. Pianca, Cedam, 2017.

Written examination, with exercises to be solved and open-ended or mutiple-choice questions. More information will be given at the beginning of the course or whenever possible.

Lectures, problem solving and group sessions, discussion of press articles. Some lectures will feature the participation of financial operators, bank officials and consultants. Changes are possible depending on the directives to face the covid-19 emergency.

Italian

The course is delivered in two periods (for a total of 10 weekly meetings, one for each week) at the S. Giobbe campus.

written and oral