In this article we review the literature on financial literacy, financial education, and consumer financial outcomes. We consider how financial literacy is measured in the current literature, and examine how well the existing literature addresses whether financial education improves financial literacy or personal financial outcomes. We discuss the extent to which a competitive market provides incentives for firms to educate consumers or offer products that facilitate informed choice. We review the literature on alternative policies to improve financial outcomes, and compare the evidence to evidence on the efficacy and cost of financial education. Finally, we discuss directions for future research.

The Post 9/11 GI Bill (PGIB) is among the largest and most generous college subsidies enacted thus far in the U.S. We examine the impact of the PGIB on veterans' college-going, degree completion, federal education tax benefit utilization, and long run earnings. Among veterans potentially induced to enroll, the introduction of the PGIB raised college enrollment by 0.17 years and B.A. completion by 1.2 percentage points (on a base of 9 percent). But, the PGIB reduced average annual earnings nine years after separation from the Army by $900 (on a base of $32,000). Years enrolled effects are larger and earnings effects more negative for veterans with lower AFQT scores and those who were less occupationally skilled. Under a variety of conservative assumptions, veterans are unlikely to recoup these reduced earnings during their working careers. All veterans who were already enrolled in college at the time of bill passage increase their months of schooling, but only for those in public institutions did this translate into increases in bachelor's degree attainment and longer-run earnings. For specific groups of students, large subsidies can modestly help degree completion but harm long run earnings due to lost labor market experience.

Still Soldiers and Scholars? sheds light on a neglected aspect of talent management, namely, officer accessions testing and evaluation. It does so by tracing the history of officer testing since 1900, identifying and analyzing key developments in the assessment process, and then offering recommendations about how the Army should revise its approach to officer testing. This book supplements a series of monographs written by the Army¿s Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis (OEMA) and published by the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) in 2009 and 2010. In those monographs, the authors proposed an officer corps strategy based on the theory of talent management. This book is a necessary first step in reforming the Army¿s officer accessions effort in order to better align it with the Army¿s talent-based approach to officer management.

Still Soldiers and Scholars? An Analysis of Army Officer Testing traces the history of officer accessions testing and assessment in the U.S. Army from about 1900 until the present day. This book is intended to supplement the series of monographs written by the Army's Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis (OEMA) that were intended to provide a conceptual and theoretical framework for the development of an Army officer corps strategy. Those monographs consider the creation and maintenance of a highly skilled officer corps in the context of the nation's continuing commitment to an all-volunteer military, its far-flung international interests, and ongoing changes in its domestic labor market. They advocate building a talent-focused strategy around a human capital model focused on accessing, developing, retaining, and employing talent.

Lack of information and advising prior to college matriculation may contribute to poor post-secondary outcomes among non-traditional students. We conducted a large-scale, multi-arm field experiment with the U.S. Army to investigate whether a package of research-based personalized information and access to advising affects postsecondary choices and attainment among a large non-traditional adult population. We find no impact of the intervention on whether veterans enroll in college, on the quality of their college enrollment, or on their persistence in college. Our results suggest that influencing non-traditional populations' educational decisions and outcomes will require substantially more intensive programs.

Information provision, choice simplification, social messaging, active-choice frameworks, and automatic enrollment all increase retirement savings. However, gauging the relative efficacy of these approaches is challenging because the supporting evidence spans widely different institutional settings, populations, and time periods. In this study, we leverage experimental and quasi-experimental variation in a constant setting, the U.S. military between 2016-2018, to examine the effects of nearly two dozen experiments for four leading policy options (i.e., information emails, action steps, target contribution rates, active choice, and automatic enrollment) designed to increase retirement savings. Consistent with previous literature, we find sizable effects of savings interventions on participation and cumulative contributions that increase with the intensity of the intervention. We then exploit cost data to complete the first cost-effectiveness analysis in the literature. Our analysis suggests that active choice programs are the most cost-effective method to generate new program participation and contributions for small, medium, and large firms, while automatic enrollment is more cost-effective for very large firms.

Deciding how much to save for retirement can be complicated. Drawing on a field experiment conducted with the Department of Defense, we study whether such complexity depresses participation in an employer-sponsored retirement saving plan. We find that simplifying one dimension of the enrollment decision, by highlighting a potential rate at which non-participants might contribute, increases participation in the plan. Similar communications that did not include a highlighted rate yield smaller effects. The results highlight how reducing complexity on the intensive margin of a decision (how much to contribute) can affect extensive margin behavior (whether to contribute at all) in a setting of policy interest.

"Because the U.S. military's long-held advantage in physical capital and equipment is waning, cutting-edge human capital management is more critical than ever before. The authors of "Starting Strong" argue that by gathering detailed information on the unique talents possessed by each newly commissioned Army officer, as well as on the unique talent demands of each Army basic branch, the Army can create a 'talent market' that identifies and liberates the strengths of every officer, aligning each with the career field where they are most likely to be engaged, productive, and satisfied leaders. Strong evidence demonstrates that this talent-based approach better aligns officer talent with occupational requirements while simultaneously increasing individual branch satisfaction"--Publisher's web site.

Does automatic enrollment into retirement savings plans increase borrowing outside the plan? We study this question using a natural experiment created when the U.S. Army began automatically enrolling its newly hired civilian employees into the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) at a default contribution rate of 3% of income. We find that four years after hire, automatic enrollment causes no significant change in debt excluding auto loans and first mortgages (point estimate = -0.6% of income), auto debt (point estimate = 1.1% of income), or first mortgage balances (point estimate = 2.2% of income). The auto and first mortgage debt effects' point estimates are large relative to the savings effect inside the TSP (point estimate = 4.1% of income) and are statistically significant in some specifications. Inferences about total effects on net worth depend on what automatic enrollment is doing to non-TSP assets, which we do not observe.