INVESTIGATING THE CAUSAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CONOMICS EDUCATION AND FINANCIAL LITERACY, DECISION-MAKING SKILLS AND ENTREPRENEURIAL INTENTION OF STUDENTS

Financial literacy and understanding its concepts is of particular importance for students; because the behavioral and financial decisions taken by them will have a significant impact on their financial and job status in the future. Based on this, the aim of the present study is to investigate the causal relationship between economics education and financial literacy, decision-making skills and entrepreneurial intention of students. In terms of purpose, the present research is applied, and according to the way of data collection, it is descriptive-correlational, based on structural equation modeling. The statistical population under study is 2733 students of technical and engineering faculty of Urmia University, of which 338 were selected by stratified random sampling. The research data collection tool is a questionnaire, and to analyze the data, firstly, the indicators of the research variables are calculated by the multiple correlation analysis method using the XLSTAT 2019 software, and then the desired model is estimated using the Stata 17 software. The findings of the research showed that economics education has a positive and significant effect on students' financial literacy, and economics education through financial literacy has an effect on students' decision-making skills and entrepreneurial intention. Therefore, higher education decision-makers are advised to consider economics-related course units in the curriculum of engineering courses, and by teaching financial literacy, provide the basis for improving students' financial-social decision-making and economic growth and sustainable development of society.