Measuring financial literacy of university students

Abstract

Defining and properly measuring financial literacy of students is a prerequisite for proposing education policy solutions. The main objective of this paper is to present a procedure of financial literacy assessment. The measure is based on the results of the survey conducted on a suitable sample of students at the University of Zagreb. It is developed using confirmatory factor analysis, which involves testing the validity of a measurement model. This model consists of four manifest variables: Knowledge, Attitudes, Behavior and Practical Knowledge, which are used to estimate a composite measure of financial literacy. The results of factor analysis were later used for obtaining the corresponding weights of indicators of financial literacy. The estimated measure indicates great heterogeneity in the level of financial literacy among students from different constituent units of the University of Zagreb.