Financial literacy and behavioral finance have become a part of education not only in the United States, but also in the whole of Europe. The process of education, in terms of financial literacy, starts at primary schools where children start to be exposed to financial literacy. It is followed by additional stages of education system. Moreover, this is completed by range of other possibilities how to become familiar with this type of knowledge, in the way of various programs, usually conducted by governments and other specialized institutions. Especially, in terms of universities behavioral finance start to play important role as well.
Based on the previous assumptions, financial literacy needs to be tested, measured and evaluated, notably the level of students studying Economics, since their participation in economic world might affect the future of our society and welfare.
The goal of this article is to verify whether there are some gaps among students and find out what are predictors standing behind various level of financial literacy. Consequently, additional target is to detect how financial literacy influences the sensitivity to behavioral biases and heuristics. This goal is reached by doing own research, which is based on an electronic questionnaire. The questionnaire consists of three main parts. In the first part, respondents provide us with their demographic data, such as age, gender, education and other. The second one focuses on objective evaluation of respondent´s knowledge of financial literacy. The last part examines behavioral finance, especially respondent´s reaction to behavioral biases.
The methods, used for the questionnaire evaluation, are descriptive statistics, enabling us to make a first assessment of the data file, and two-sample t-test, enabling compare different groups or samples. It also provides a chance to verify whether suffering from a particular bias corresponds with higher of lower level of financial literacy.
Keywords: Financial literacy, behavioral finance, survey, t-test, biases and heuristics