Level of Knowledge in Personal Finance by University Freshmen Management Students

Abstract

Financial literacy becomes one of the key competencies for life in modern society, and its importance grew significantly in the last decade. The study aims to determine how well newly coming university management stu­dents understand basic consumer financial concepts. The research is based on primary data by questionnaires and a sample of 342 students from the target population within Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The question­naire contained in its first part some questions covering the individual per­sonal socio-economic characteristics. In the second part, the respondents solved thirteen problems submitted as multiple-choice questions that tested their knowledge about personal finance. Authors examine the relationships among the personality characteristics of the students and their financial liter­acy. This leads to several remarkable findings. Due to the specialization of the study, the difference between the genders is blurred. As a significant source of the differences in financial literacy, the authors detect the previous education of the respondents and the forms of education in financial literacy.