Assessing Gender Gaps in Stock Market Participation

Rubina Hundal, Harris School PhD student
Emma Zhang, Econ PhD student

We are interested in studying the determinants of the gender gap in financial investments. Our focus is on the extensive margin of investing in the stock market, which has been difficult to study due to the lack of large-scale exogenous variation in income and information, and access to retail bank data. This extensive margin investing gap can lead to large differences in medium and long-run consumption. We aim to study whether the gender investment gap is better explained by rational preferences or behavioral biases by randomizing both positive income shocks as well as information. We aim to observe outcomes in spending and investment behavior through retail bank data. We conduct our study in two difference countries, Australia and India, as existing literature suggests that cross-country diferences in gender norms may either exacerbate or explain away the underlying causes of the gender investment gap.