Fearless Woman: Financial Literacy and Stock Market Participation

Annamaria Lusardi (), Tabea Bucher-Koenen, Rob Alessie and Maarten van Rooij

No 15913, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Women are less financially literate than men. It is unclear whether this gap reflects a lack of knowledge or, rather, a lack of confidence. Our survey experiment shows that women tend to disproportionately respond “do not know†to questions measuring financial knowledge, but when this response option is unavailable, they often choose the correct answer. We estimate a latent class model and predict the probability that respondents truly know the correct answers. We find that about one-third of the financial literacy gender gap can be explained by women’s lower confidence levels. Both financial knowledge and confidence explain stock market participation.

Keywords: Financial knowledge; Gender gap; Financial decision making; Confidence; Measurement error; Latent class model; Finite mixture model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 D91 G53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-exp and nep-fle
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (39)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15913 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: Fearless Woman. Financial Literacy and Stock Market Participation (2021)
Working Paper: Fearless Woman: Financial Literacy and Stock Market Participation (2021)
Working Paper: Fearless Woman: Financial Literacy and Stock Market Participation (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15913

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15913

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().