Marriage and other risky assets: A portfolio approach

Graziella Bertocchi (), Marianna Brunetti and Costanza Torricelli

Journal of Banking & Finance, 2011, vol. 35, issue 11, 2902-2915

Abstract: We study the joint impact of gender and marital status on financial investments by testing the hypothesis that marriage represents - in a portfolio framework - a sort of safe asset and that this attribute may change over time. We show that married individuals have a higher propensity to invest in risky assets than single ones, that this marital status gap is stronger for women and that, for women only, it evolves and declines at the end of the sample period. Next we explore a number of possible explanations of the observed gender differences by controlling for background factors that capture the evolution of family and society. We find that both the higher female marital status gap and its time variability vanish for those women who are employed. Our empirical investigation is based on a dataset drawn from the 1993-2006 Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth.

Keywords: Household; portfolios; Risky; investments; Marriage; Divorce; Labor; force; participation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (57)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378426611001245
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Marriage and Other Risky Assets: A Portfolio Approach (2009)
Working Paper: Marriage and Other Risky Assets: A Portfolio Approach (2009)
Working Paper: Marriage and Other Risky Assets: A Portfolio Approach (2009)
Working Paper: Marriage and Other Risky Assets: A Portfolio Approach (2009)
Working Paper: Marriage and Other Risky Assets: A Portfolio Approach (2008)
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:eee:jbfina:v:35:y:2011:i:11:p:2902-2915

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Banking & Finance is currently edited by Ike Mathur

More articles in Journal of Banking & Finance from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().