Safe Options Induce Gender Differences in Risk Attitudes

Paolo Crosetto and Antonio Filippin

No 10793, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Gender differences in risk attitudes are frequently observed, although recent literature has shown that they are context dependent rather than ubiquitous. In this paper we try to rationalize the heterogeneity of results investigating experimentally whether the presence of a safe option among the set of alternatives explains why females are more risk averse than males. We manipulate three widely used risk elicitation methods finding that the availability of a safe option causally affects risk attitudes. The presence of a riskless alternative does not entirely explain the gender gap but it has a significant effect in triggering or magnifying (when already present) such differences. Despite the pronounced instability that usually characterizes the measurement of risk preferences, we show estimating a structural model that the effect of a safe option is remarkably stable across tasks. This paper constitutes the first successful attempt to shed light on the determinants of gender differences in risk attitudes.

Keywords: experiment; risk attitudes; gender differences; safe option (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 C91 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2017-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-gen and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Safe options induce gender differences in risk attitudes (2018)
Working Paper: Safe options induce gender differences in risk attitudes (2017)
Working Paper: Safe options induce gender differences in risk attitudes (2017)
Working Paper: Safe options induce gender differences in risk attitudes (2017)
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