Abstract
This paper studies the gender gap in net wealth. We use administrative data on wealth that are linked to the Estonian Household Finance and Consumption Survey, which provides individual-level wealth data for all household types. The unconditional gender gap in mean wealth is 45%, but this sizeable gap in means originates mainly from the top tail of the distribution, where men have much more wealth than women, while the gender differences in wealth are statistically insignificant in most of the lower wealth quintiles. At the top of the distribution the differences in wealth can be explained by larger self-employment activity of men. Men have more business wealth than women do, and the gender wealth gap is the largest for this asset class. The gender wealth gaps across different household types are very heterogeneous. The unconditional gaps in wealth are strongly in favour of men throughout most of the wealth distribution for married couples. For single-member households, on the other hand, the raw gaps are in favour of women in the lower half of the wealth distribution. These raw gaps in opposite directions can mostly be explained by differences in the observed characteristics of men and women among married couples vs single people.
Highlights
The gender gaps in various forms of income, such as wages or pensions, have been extensively studied in the academic literature, but there have been substantially fewer studies that have focused on the gender differences in wealth
In this subsection we show the results of the net wealth decomposition for different household types
The current paper studies the gender wealth gap in Estonia, the country that has the widest gender wage gap in Europe
Summary
The gender gaps in various forms of income, such as wages or pensions, have been extensively studied in the academic literature, but there have been substantially fewer studies that have focused on the gender differences in wealth. Schmidt and Sevak 2006; Schneebaum et al 2018, and Ravazzini and Chesters 2018) or impute the allocation of wealth within larger households using data from singlemember households (for an overview of the methods for this see Bonthieux and Meurs 2015) Both of these approaches have disadvantages because the unconditional gender wealth gaps vary over different household types. They are larger for couple-headed households and smaller and often statistically insignificant for singlemember households (Sierminska et al 2010; Bonnet et al 2013). This means that the gender gaps that are estimated on the basis of single-member households are not generalisable to the whole population
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
