What Explains the Gender Gap in Wealth? Evidence from Administrative Data, ,This chapter is a preliminary draft unless otherwise noted. It may not have been subjected to the formal review process of the NBER. This page will be updated as the chapter is revised.
Chapter in forthcoming NBER book Measuring Distribution and Mobility of Income and Wealth, Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Janet C. Gornick, Barry Johnson, and Arthur Kennickell, editors 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. We find that the unconditional gender gap in mean wealth is 45% and that it is caused by large wealth disparities in the upper end of the wealth distribution. The structure of assets owned by men is more diversified than that for women. Men own more business assets and vehicles, while women own more deposits. The gender gaps in these asset components cannot be explained by observable characteristics. For partner-headed households the raw gender gaps across deciles are mostly in favour of men, and more strongly so for married couples, indicating that resources are not entirely pooled within households. For single-member households the raw gaps across quantiles are partially in favour of women. Accounting for observable characteristics renders the unexplained parts of the gaps mostly insignificant for all household types. This paper is available as PDF (1817 K) or via email
Supplementary materials for this chapter: Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX This chapter first appeared as NBER working paper w26920, What Explains the Gender Gap in Wealth? Evidence from Administrative Data, Jaanika Meriküll, Merike Kukk, Tairi Rõõm |
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