Mind the gap: Gender differences in inflation expectations

Winnie Coleman

No 2026/21, Discussion Papers from Free University Berlin, School of Business & Economics

Abstract: A persistent gender gap in inflation expectations, i.e., women systematically reporting higher expected inflation than men on average, has been documented across countries and over time, yet its underlying causes remain under debate. Using more than half a million responses from the ECB Consumer Expectations Survey and a double machine learning framework that provides valid inference on many dimensions of heterogeneity at once, I show that there is no single gender gap: individualized gaps range from roughly -1 to +5 percentage points. This heterogeneity is shaped primarily by subjective belief-formation variables, such as forecast uncertainty and the rounding of inflation beliefs, and only to a much lesser extent by objective ones, such as financial literacy. When inflation is high enough to attract consumers' attention, the average gap narrows, but the distribution of individual gaps fans out, widening precisely for economically vulnerable women. Since the women who diverge most from men hold the most imprecise beliefs, communication that reduces ambiguity, rather than solely providing information, is a promising policy lever.

Keywords: Consumer Inflation Expectations; Expectation Formation; Gender; Double Machine Learning; Big Data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C55 D84 E31 E58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/343048/1/1980449082.pdf (application/pdf)

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:zbw:fubsbe:343048

DOI: 10.17169/refubium-53175

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Free University Berlin, School of Business & Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().