Gender, risk tolerance, and false consensus in asset allocation recommendations

Nicolas P.B. Bollen and Steven Posavac

Journal of Banking & Finance, 2018, vol. 87, issue C, 304-317

Abstract: We study the impact of gender on asset allocation recommendations. Graduate business students and professional wealth managers are randomly assigned a male or female client. Participants recommend an allocation and choose an allocation for themselves. Male students choose a riskier allocation than female students, consistent with existing evidence of a gender difference in risk tolerance, and recommend a riskier allocation. In contrast, male and female wealth managers choose and recommend the same allocation, indicating that male and female finance professionals feature similar risk preferences. In both samples, a subject's allocation choice is the strongest predictor of the recommendation provided.

Keywords: Risk tolerance; Gender; Asset allocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D14 G02 G11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378426617302686
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:87:y:2018:i:c:p:304-317

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbankfin.2017.10.016

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 ().