The Finance Brown Bag Seminar is held by the Institute for Finance, Banking and Insurance (WU Vienna) and the Vienna Graduate School of Finance (VGSF). It serves as a presentation platform for PhD students, faculty members, and visitors. An overview of BBS on the website of the Institute for Finance, Banking and Insurance.
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Marta Cota, Nova SBE
Is Knowledge Enough? Financial Literacy, Marriage, and Gender Differences in Wealth
with Marta Morazzoni (University College London); Maria Frech (Toulouse School of Economics); Michael Tallent (University College London)
This paper studies whether financial literacy shapes gender differences in wealth. Using data from the United States and the Netherlands, we document that women have lower financial literacy and confidence than men, are less likely to manage long-term investments within their households, and hold fewer financial assets, with the largest gaps among married agents. We build a life-cycle portfolio-choice model with endogenous financial literacy accumulation and marital dynamics centered around two wedges: a higher cost of literacy investment for married women and gender-specific perceived returns on risky assets. The calibrated model qualitatively matches untargeted life-cycle patterns in literacy and portfolio choice, ac- counting for a third of the gender gap in individual financial assets. Counterfactual exercises show that early-life financial education can narrow the gender knowledge gap, and portfolio-allocation rules may offset confidence and marriage-related wedges that education may not undo, lowering the wealth gap by 6%.
