Finanças comportamentais: um estudo de caso da escassez e da largura de banda em alunos do ensino médio

Abstract

This study descriptively analyzes the behavior of third-year high school students in financial decisions and their knowledge of finance, in order to investigate whether socioeconomic conditions and the scarcity of financial resources contribute to their decision-making, including expenses short and long term, saving tendencies, knowledge about credit and debit cards, inflation, taxes and loans; knowledge that influences issues such as default and perspectives on quality of life. The work is based on the analysis of the bandwidth effect proposed by Mullainathan and Shafir (2016) in which the smaller amount of cognitive resources caused by the scarcity of financial resources, causes a tendency to a break in the rationality proposed by the mainstream theory, causing less rational choices and less longterm thinking. In this context, the study aims to analyze the impact of the lack of cognitive resources on third year high school students. For data collection, a questionnaire was used, in which 81 students from the third year of high school from the EEFM Prof. Jáder Moreira de Carvalho and Colégio Maria Ester 2, being respectively a public and a private school, located about 2 kilometers away from each other. To analyze the data, descriptive and comparative analyzes were used between the results of the questionnaires in the two schools, in order to determine whether students with lower income would have a tendency to spend without planning, less tendency to save and less financial knowledge in general, given the limitation of available resources compared to students with higher family income. The study concluded that students with a lower level of disposable income do not necessarily have less financial knowledge or make less rational decisions, presenting the opposite result, within the case study, the theory of Shafir and Mullainathan (2016).