Gender in Banking and Mortgage Behavior

Abstract

Compared to men, women, even financial professionals, exhibit higher risk aversion. We exploit random assignment of clients to banking advisors (‘private bankers’) in a large Czech bank to study the effects of advisor gender on the probability of mortgage issuance and on the probability that a newly issued mortgage is insured, which we interpret as corresponding to risk averse mortgage behavior. Male advisors do not substantially affect the chances that their clients will take a new mortgage, but the mortgages that they issue are dramatically less likely to be insured, particularly so for female clients who never had an insured loan with the bank.