蘑菇短视频

Gary Curnutt

A new study by a faculty member in the College of Business at 蘑菇短视频 examines the impact of ownership of cryptocurrency on a household鈥檚 financial literacy and its perception of how prepared the family may be for coping with a budgetary crisis.

Gary Curnutt, assistant professor of finance at WCU, conducted the study titled 鈥淗eterogeneous Effects of Financial Literacy: The Moderating Role of Cryptocurrency Ownership in Financial Resilience鈥� over the summer through a grant awarded by A.J. Grube, dean of the College of Business.

鈥淭he Summer Research Grants Program awards funding to up to four faculty members from the College of Business,鈥� Grube said. 鈥淔aculty submit proposals in February and March, and a committee of faculty, usually composed of past grant recipients, selects the winning proposals for the summer.

Grant recipients are awarded $5,000 each to support their research and are expected to submit a proposal for conference presentation and then submit a written product of the research upon completion, she said.

For his research project, Curnutt investigated whether financial literacy 鈥� the ability to understand and use personal finance skills such as budgeting, saving, investing and managing debt 鈥� relates to emergency preparedness differently for households with cryptocurrency and those without it.

Curnutt鈥檚 central finding is that cryptocurrency ownership is a statistically significant negative moderator of the relationship between financial literacy and perceived emergency capability.

鈥淧ut more simply, greater financial literacy was associated with greater emergency preparedness among households that did not own cryptocurrency, but that positive relationship was absent among cryptocurrency-owning households. The difference between the two groups was statistically significant,鈥� he said.

In households that did not own cryptocurrency, higher financial literacy was associated with a greater likelihood of reporting that the family could obtain $2,000 within one month if an emergency situation arose, he said.

鈥淐ryptocurrency ownership significantly moderated that relationship. The positive connection between financial literacy and emergency capability was substantially weaker among households reporting cryptocurrency ownership,鈥� Curnutt said.

鈥淭he findings do not mean that cryptocurrency causes greater or lower financial preparedness. Instead, they suggest that conventional financial literacy measures may not provide the same information about preparedness across the two groups,鈥� he said.

Because of that fact, financial planners may need to ask their clients more directly where their emergency money would come from, how quickly it could be accessed and how reliable it would be during a crisis, he said.

The finding about the impact of crypto ownership remained similar across several additional robustness and measurement checks, although the study also identified important limitations and does not establish why the relationship differs between the groups, he said.

For his study, Curnutt used data from the 2024 National Financial Capability Study State-by-State Survey, a triennial research project by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority鈥檚 Investor Education Foundation with nearly 25,000 respondents from across the United States. With that data, he conducted a statistical analysis of how financial literacy is related to self-reported ownership of cryptocurrencies.

His results indicate that financial literacy significantly increases emergency capability among non-crypto households, with predicted preparedness rates rising based on financial literacy levels. In contrast, crypto owners exhibit a higher and relatively stable baseline probability of emergency readiness, with a slope of financial literacy that is significantly flatter, he said.

鈥淭hese findings suggest that crypto owners represent a distinct financial segment whose resilience is less dependent on traditional literacy measures, whereas literacy remains a strong predictor for non-owners,鈥� Curnutt said. 鈥淭he study highlights the need for planners and educators to adapt client assessments and risk diagnostics as emerging financial technologies reshape household financial behaviors.鈥�

Curnutt鈥檚 recent study builds upon his previous study titled "Financial Vulnerability and Cryptocurrency Use: Evidence on the Limits of Financial Inclusion Abstract,鈥� which examined whether cryptocurrency functions as an alternative financial tool for financially excluded consumers or whether its use remains constrained by the same vulnerabilities that limit participation in traditional financial systems.

Other 蘑菇短视频College of Business faculty members who received $5,000 in summer research money are Dan Bradbury, assistant professor of marketing; Aaron Heinrich, assistant professor of operations management; and Christine Kirkland, assistant professor of management.

Findings from those studies will be the subject of upcoming stories from the College of Business.