GENDER DIFFERENCES IN RISK AVERSION AND AMBIGUITY AVERSION

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Borghans, Lex; Heckman, James J.; Golsteyn, Bart H. H.; Meijers, Huub
• 署名单位: Maastricht University; University of Chicago
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1542-4766
• DOI: 10.1162/JEEA.2009.7.2-3.649
• 发表日期: 2009
• 页码: 649-658
• 关键词: financial decision-making

摘要

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)