Finanças comportamentais: a educação financeira e o risco

Abstract

In today's world, individuals grow having to deal increasingly with several financial issues, where all the decisions made involve risk characteristics. This makes financial education extremely important, as it allows individuals to make better choices, to avoid being victims of fraud, to better integrate in society and to acquire greater financial well-being in the long term. Therefore, the aim of this study was to analyze, from the perspective of behavioral finance, financial education, awareness and risk behavior of university students in the city of Santana do Livramento. To this end, a survey was conducted, onsisting of 625 respondents to a 31-question questionnaire as collection instrument. The data analysis was conducted through descriptive statistics (mean, median, standard deviation, frequency, percentage and Pearson correlation), scale reliability test (Cronbach’s alpha) hypothesis tests (t test and ANOVA). According to the study, it was revealed that the students surveyed have considerably poor financial education if compared to their levels of schooling. Despite their low levels of financial knowledge, however, students have proven to possess a good level of perception on risk and tend to adopt cautious behaviour when addressing financial affairs. The results also demonstrate that financial education has a positive relation to risk perception and a negative one to financial risk behaviour. It is expected that the results of this paper instigate further studies in the field of behavioural finance, in a way that it contributes to the development of the theme in Brazil.