Gender Differences in Risk Aversion and Ambiguity Aversion

Lex Borghans, Bart Golsteyn (), James Heckman and Huub Meijers

Journal of the European Economic Association, 2009, vol. 7, issue 2-3, 649-658

Abstract: This paper demonstrates gender differences in risk aversion and ambiguity aversion. It also contributes to a growing literature relating economic preference parameters to psychological measures by asking whether variations in preference parameters among persons, and in particular across genders, can be accounted for by differences in personality traits and traits of cognition. Women are more risk-averse than men. Over an initial range, women require no further compensation for the introduction of ambiguity but men do. At greater levels of ambiguity, women have the same marginal distaste for increased ambiguity as men. Psychological variables account for some of the interpersonal variation in risk aversion. They explain none of the differences in ambiguity. (JEL: J24, D03, D80) (c) 2009 by the European Economic Association.

JEL-codes: D03 D80 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (393)

Downloads: (external link)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1542-4774/issues link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Gender Differences in Risk Aversion and Ambiguity Aversion (2009)
Working Paper: Gender Differences in Risk Aversion and Ambiguity Aversion (2009)
Working Paper: Gender differences in risk aversion and ambiguity aversion (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:tpr:jeurec:v:7:y:2009:i:2-3:p:649-658

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the European Economic Association is currently edited by Xavier Vives, George-Marios Angeletos, Orazio P. Attanasio, Fabio Canova and Roberto Perotti

More articles in Journal of the European Economic Association from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().