Abstract
We study the joint impact of gender and marital status on financial investments by testing the hypothesis that marriage represents – in a portfolio framework – a sort of safe asset and that this attribute may change over time. We show that married individuals have a higher propensity to invest in risky assets than single ones, that this marital status gap is stronger for women and that, for women only, it evolves and declines at the end of the sample period. Next we explore a number of possible explanations of the observed gender differences by controlling for background factors that capture the evolution of family and society. We find that both the higher female marital status gap and its time variability vanish for those women who are employed. Our empirical investigation is based on a dataset drawn from the 1993–2006 Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth.
Highlights
The goal of this paper is to investigate the joint impact of gender and marital status on portfolio decisions, as well as its evolution
We test the hypothesis of marriage as a safe asset along a time dimension, taking into account the increased incidence of divorce, with the consequent breakdown of the traditional family, and the parallel expansion of female labor force participation, which has redefined the role of women in society
Based on a dataset drawn from the 1989-2006 Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth, we have studied to joint impact of gender and marital status on financial decisions, its time evolution, and the determinants of this evolution
Summary
The goal of this paper is to investigate the joint impact of gender and marital status on portfolio decisions, as well as its evolution. The decline of marriage and the increasing diffusion of divorce represent a common tendency among industrialized countries Within this broader picture, the Italian society has experienced a fast evolution, with a pronounced transformation of its family structure. The original form of the legislation was very conservative, and allowed couples to obtain a divorce only five years after their legal separation Still, this legal innovation confirmed an emerging trend toward societal modernization and an ongoing evolution of traditional gender roles. Even discounting the impact of the 1987 reform, the data clearly show a structural break, which can be dated at around the beginning of the 1990s and marks the end of the Italian traditionally stable family structure These trends document a significant increase in marital instability, with a consequent increase in the risks of marriage breakdown
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