Gender Differences in Risk Aversion and Ambiguity Aversion

By Lex Borghans, Bart H. H. Golsteyn, James J. Heckman, H. Meijers. Social Science Research Network, 2009

738 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/582d87ed986674d8f7fe2d93e481630fbc56f374

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Citations in the corpus

The Relationship between Economic Preferences and Psychological Personality Measures (2012, result): “This finding is in line with the significant positive association between risk aversion and neuroticism reported by Borghans et al. (2009).”
Cognitive (ir)reflection: New experimental evidence☆ (2016, methodology): “The Big Five test has received increasing attention by economists as a useful tool in explaining heterogeneity in individual preferences (Borghans et al., 2009; Daly et al., 2009), academic achievement and labor market performance (Barrick and Mount, 1991; Judge et al.”
Economic behavior of children and adolescents – A first survey of experimental economics results (2019, background): “Regarding gender differences in risk preferences, there is strong evidence of girls being significantly more risk averse than boys (Levin and Hart, 2003; Borghans et al., 2009; Moreira et al., 2010; Booth and Nolen, 2012b; Cárdenas et al., 2012; Eckel et al., 2012; Sutter et al., 2013; Deckers et al”
Are Women Really More Risk-Averse than Men? (2012, unknown): “For example, the generic statement "Ducks lay eggs" is generally accepted as true.”
Risk Preferences Around the World (2015, result): “…significant and robust gender effect: female subjects tend to be more risk averse in gains, which supports most previous studies (Agnew et al. 2008, Borghans et al. 2009, Byrnes et al. 1999, Croson and Gneezy 2009, Dohmen et al. 2011, Hartog et al. 2002, Schubert et al. 1999, von Gaudecker et al.…”