Risk Attitudes and Investment Decisions across European Countries: Are Women More Conservative Investors than Men?

Oleg Badunenko, Nataliya Barasinska and Dorothea Schäfer

No 928, Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: This study questions the popular stereotype that women are more risk averse than men in their financial investment decisions. The analysis is based on micro-level data from large-scale surveys of private households in five European countries. In our analysis of investment decisions, we directly account for individuals' self-perceived willingness to take financial risks. The empirical evidence we provide only weakly supports the gender differences argument. We find that women are less likely to invest in risky financial assets. However, when the probability of investing is controlled for, males and females are found to allocate equal shares of their wealth to risky assets.

Keywords: Gender; risk aversion; financial behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G11 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 p.
Date: 2009
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cfn, nep-eec and nep-upt
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.341838.de/dp928.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Risk Attitudes and Investment Decisions across European Countries: Are Women More Conservative Investors than Men? (2009)
Working Paper: Risk Attitudes and Investment Decisions across European Countries: Are Women More Conservative Investors than Men? (2009)
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:diw:diwwpp:dp928

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().