STATISTICAL STUDY OF THE TENDENCY OF YOUNG PEOPLE FOR DEVIANT FINANCIAL BEHAVIOR
The paper presents a statistical study of the students’ attitude to deviant financial behavior. The author’s approach allows to profile young people according to their risk appetite, attitude to money and financialliteracy level. As a main tool, we used the specially developed questionnaire. 912 senior students of the largest universities of the South of Russia, enrolled in educational programs in technical and engineering sciences, humanities and social sciences, as well as in economics and management, were interviewed. We revealed that the tolerance of South Russian students to deviations of financial behavior is quite high in general. About 13% of respondents showed tolerance for violation of the norms and rules in more than half of the proposed situations. We revealed statistically significant differences in exposure to deviant financial behavior depending on an individual’s attitude to risk. We determined the characteristics of young people who are more prone to the financial deviations manifestation. The study showed that more prone to financial deviations were young men, working students; students in the humanities and social sciences; living in regional cities with a population of over 100 thousand people before studying at the university. We revealed that more likely to be involved in illegal financial schemes those respondents who used the services of microfinance organizations (personally or their families); had a sufficiently high level of family income and personal expenses; evaluated their financial situation as either very poor or above average; faced with problems of lack of money before a scholarship or salary often enough, or never faced such problems. The results of our study can be used to formulate policies to improve financial literacy, as well as to adjust economic policy in general.