Abstract. We measure the community-bank footprint of state financial education mandates using staggered adoption across seven US states (2005–2019). The treatment is a continuous Cohort Exposure Index (CEI) capturing the mandate-exposed share of the working-age population. In a panel of 81,549 community bank-year observations, CEI is positively associated with net interest margin; the gradient is concentrated in banks with higher consumer loan share and is accompanied by elevated consumer-loan charge-offs. An arithmetic decomposition bounds the channel’s expected per-bank magnitude; our estimates fall inside this band, consistent with the bank-balance-sheet channel operating at the scale the underlying cohort mechanism allows.

Keywords: financial literacy, financial education mandates, net interest margin, community banks, staggered difference-in-differences.