Strong Evidence for Gender Differences in Investment

Abstract:     
Are men more willing to take financial risks than women? The answer to this important question is not clear from the existing literature. We propose a novel approach to this issue, in which we both assemble the data from many experiments with thousands of participants in a simple investment game, and also conduct our own experiments. The previous experiments were not designed to investigate a gender difference and were conducted by different researchers in different countries, with different instructions, durations, payments, subject pools, etc. We find a very consistent result that women invest less, and thus appear to be more risk averse than men in their financial investments.

Keywords: Financial risk, gender differences, experiment, risk attitudes

JEL Classifications: B49, C91, D81, G11, G19, J16

Working Paper Series