Peer Financial Learning and Perceived Household Financial Management in High-Informality Contexts: A Covariate-Adjusted Mediation Analysis in the Piura Region, Peru

In economies where informal employment predominates, households acquire much of their money-management repertoire by observing neighbours and relatives rather than through formal instruction. This study examined whether such peer financial learning is associated with perceived household financial management, whether financial self-efficacy transmits part of that association, and whether socioeconomic status conditions it. A structured questionnaire was administered to 384 adults responsible for household finances in sixteen districts of the Piura region, Peru, and the data were analysed with hierarchical regression, conditional process models and a latent-variable structural equation model, with socioeconomic status entered as a covariate throughout and standard errors clustered by district. Peer financial learning retained a significant incremental association with perceived household financial management after sociodemographic and socioeconomic controls, although the increment was modest in comparison with the share of variance attributable to socioeconomic status. The indirect route through financial self-efficacy was small and did not hold in the latent-variable specification, and socioeconomic moderation was not supported. Discriminant validity between the learning and management constructs was not established, and sensitivity bounds indicated that the incremental association is not robust to plausible unobserved confounding. The findings caution against treating peer learning as a stand-alone lever for Sustainable Development Goals 1, 4, 8 and 10 and point to the need for measures that separate learning from management and that record formal financial access directly.