The Gender Wealth Gap Across European Countries

Abstract

This paper studies the gap in wealth between male and female single households using 2010 Household Finance and Consumption Survey data for eight European countries. In the raw data, a large gap emerges at the upper end of the unconditional distribution. While OLS estimates show no difference in average net wealth levels, quantile regressions at the 95 th percentile yield mixed evidence for the gender wealth gap in different specifications. Labour market characteristics and participation in asset and debt categories largely explain the differences between male and female single households. We show that the gender gap in net wealth is driven by gender gaps in gross wealth and its components, but is attenuated in four countries by gender gaps in (collateralized) debt. In the full specification, the unexplained gap in gross wealth amounts to 27% in Slovakia, 33% in France, 44% in Austria, 45% in Germany, and 48% in Greece. A robustness check using person-level pension wealth confirms the presence of a gender gap for the full population.JEL Classifications: D31; J16; E21

The Impact of Unconventional Monetary Policy on Gendered Wealth Inequality

“…The lowest wealth quintile owns only 3 percent whereas the top 5 per cent owns 55 per cent. These results are corroborated by Schneebaum et al, (2014) analysis of the gender wealth gap using the Household Finance and Consumption Survey data. They find that households with only one male adult have more net wealth than households with one female adult, and that households with an adult couple have the highest net wealth.…”

“…Nevertheless, it is pretty safe to assume that, on average: single parents are more often females than males; lower education level is more common among women; and women have less wealth and income (lower quintiles of wealth and income distribution). That female single households have less wealth than males is corroborated by Schneebaum et al (2014). In fact, their study is the first analyzing a gendered wealth effect across euro-area countries.…”

Drivers of wealth inequality in euro area countries: the effect of inheritance and gifts on household gross and net wealth distribution analysed by applying the Shapley value approach to decomposition*

“…As the distribution of wealth data is not only highly skewed but net wealth data also comprise, due to outstanding debts of households, negative and zero values, we cannot apply a logarithmic transformation of the data, but must resort to a transformation often used in the literature on wealth stocks (see for example Burbidge et al 1988;MacKinnon/Magee 1990;Pence 2006;Schneebaum et al 2014), namely the inverse hyperbolic sine transformation (IHS):…”

What Explains the Gender Gap in Wealth? Evidence from Administrative Data

“…Consequently, many studies on this topic are based on household-level data, which means that they either analyse the gender wealth gap only among households with one member (e.g. Schmidt and Sevak (2006), Schneebaum et al (2018), and Ravazzini and Chesters (2018)) or impute the allocation of wealth within larger households on the basis of the data from single-member households (for an overview of the methods for this see Bonthieux and Meurs (2015)). Both of these approaches have disadvantages, because the raw (or unconditional) gender wealth gaps vary over different household types.…”