Conhecimento e comportamento financeiro de jovens adultos: um estudo com alunos de faculdades da cidade de São Paulo

Abstract

Seeking to understand the factors that influence people`s financial decisions has been very frequent in academic research in several countries. Even considering the characteristics of each country, several common points have been identified in order to explain people’s financial behavior. In Brazil, the theme “financial behavior and education” increases significantly, because the improvement of population living conditions in the last years brought a significant number of people to market, and, in this scenario, a look at young adults is very important as long as this population range begins to engage in financial decisions, such as purchasing a vehicle, a real state property or starting a financial reserve for emergencies. To understand the financial behavior of these young people, this research makes a replication of De Bassa Scheresberg (2013). The work seeks to explain how social economics profiles and financial knowledge are related to young people’s behavior in decisions about loans, formation of financial reservations and retirement planning. Some findings of this study, accomplished through a research with 419 young people from six universities of the city of São Paulo, were similar to the object of the replication and to other studies, while other findings were not. This research concludes, in the same way as De Bassa Sheresberg (2013), that income and education are important predictors of financial education. It also concludes the variable “educational institutional rating” is a strong predictor of knowledge and financial behavior of young people.