Is the willingness to take financial risk a sex-linked trait? Evidence from national surveys of household finance

Nataliya Barasinska and Dorothea Schäfer

No 05/2013, Discussion Papers from Deutsche Bundesbank

Abstract: We investigate whether the willingness to take investment risk is a sex-linked trait and link the results to the country's gender equality regime. Our empirical analysis involves household data on financial asset holdings as well as on self-reported risk tolerance for Austria, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. Of those countries, Italy is by far the country with the greatest degree of gender inequality according to the 2009 Global Gender Gap Report. Two stages of building a portfolio of financial assets are analyzed. For the first-stage decision of whether to invest in risky assets in the first place, gender is found to have no effect in Austria, the Netherlands and Spain but does have an impact in Italy. However, even for Italy, it seems to be irrelevant in the second-stage decision about the share of wealth invested in the risky assets. We infer from these findings that, for countries with a high degree of gender equality, it is inappropriate to base financial advice primarily on gender.

Keywords: gender; risk aversion; financial behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G11 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-eur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/70923/1/739431773.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Is the Willingness to Take Financial Risk a Sex-Linked Trait?: Evidence from National Surveys of Household Finance (2013)
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:zbw:bubdps:052013

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Deutsche Bundesbank Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().