Marriage and Other Risky Assets: A Portfolio Approach

Costanza Torricelli, Graziella Bertocchi () and Marianna Brunetti

No 7162, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We study the joint impact of gender and marital status on financial investment by testing the hypothesis that marriage represents - in a portfolio framework - a sort of safe asset, and that this effect is stronger for women. We show that married individuals have a higher propensity to invest in risky assets than single ones, that the marital status gap is stronger for women than for men and that, for women only, the marital status gap evolves over time. Next we explore a number of possible explanations of the observed gender differences by controlling for background and individual 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 1989-2006 Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth.

Keywords: Divorce; Labor force participation; Marriage; Portfolio choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E21 G11 J12 J21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP7162 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Marriage and other risky assets: A portfolio approach (2011)
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:cpr:ceprdp:7162

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP7162

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().