Aversão ao risco entre estudantes de Ciências Contábeis: um estudo sob a ótica das finanças comportamentais

Abstract

While modern finance assumes that man is able to analyze all available information and, thus, make aware and rational decisions, studies in behavioral finance assert that human beings are endowed with constraints which prevent them from always deciding for the best alternative, by being under the influence of emotions and biases that affect their judgment. Given the importance of decision making in situations of risk in the Accounting field, this study aimed to analyze the risk aversion among Accounting Science academics of Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (Public University of Santa Maria), in the second semester of 2014, taking into consideration the stage in the course, the fact of working or not, the future career choices and other demographic variables that construct the profile of the students, in order to verify how these variables were associated with risk aversion. To this purpose, a questionnaire was applied to 258 students and the collected data were processed by non-parametric statistic tests of Mann-Whitney, Kruskal-Wallis and Spearman’s Correlation. The results demonstrated that the gender is the variable that is most associated with risk aversion and, regarding the stage in the course, there are associations that oppose the findings in the literature, however, they are not sufficient to state a relation among the variables. The remaining variables showed little or no significant existence, which can be explained by the influence of a variable analyzed in the results of others and also by the influence of those which were not addressed in this study, as the socioeconomic order variables.