Development of a comprehensive financial literacy scale

Abstract

Financial literacy and money management practices are fundamental aspects of economic growth. After developing a literature review, we analyze the most important aspects of the terminology and propose an integral definition of the financial literacy concept. The final goal of this paper is to develop a comprehensive scale to measure financial literacy as defined by the authors according to the evolution of the concept, taking into account related scales to money management found in the literature, and applicable to a wide range of people. The authors develop a structural equation modeling to relate unobserved constructs to observed variables and validate the scale with a divergent and convergent analysis.