Financial Literacy and Crypto Asset Ownership
Evidence from Europe
Description
The role of financial literacy in shaping crypto-asset ownership remains empirically unresolved, with prior studies reporting conflicting results across countries and survey instruments. This paper advances the literature by providing the first harmonized EU-wide evidence on how financial knowledge, digital confidence, and advisory trust relate to crypto ownership. Using individual-level data from the 2023 Flash Eurobarometer for 27 EU Member States, I estimate logit models with country fixed effects and clustered standard errors. The results show that higher objective financial knowledge is consistently associated with a lower probability of owning crypto-assets, whereas digital confidence exerts a large and robust positive effect. In contrast, confidence in financial advisers has no systematic association with ownership. These findings clarify the financial-literacy puzzle in the existing literature and suggest that retail crypto adoption in Europe is driven more by perceived digital competence than by financial sophistication.
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