The European Finance Association has awarded Economics researcher Annika Bacher the EFA Doctoral Tutorial Best Paper Prize, presented at their Doctoral Tutorial event.
The European Finance Association is the leading finance association in Europe. Its annual Doctoral Tutorial is an intensive and competitive session designed for PhD students who are nearing the end of their doctoral theses and is held on the day the EFA Meeting officially begins. In 2021, out of 134 submitted research papers, only 8 were selected to be presented in the EFA-DT.
Annika Bacher's prize-winning paper The Gender Investment Gap over the Life-Cycle documents that single women invest on average less risky assets than single men. For example, women are less likely to hold risky assets, such as stocks or mutual funds, and allocate a smaller share of their overall wealth into risky assets. Given that risky assets pay in expectation higher returns than safe assets (“equity premium”), gender differences in investment behavior translate into wealth differences across single men and single women.
Next, the paper explores the determinants of this so-called “Gender Investment Gap” and finds that gender differences in income levels and in the number of household members (which arise mainly because single women are more likely to live with their children) are the two most important factors to explain the observed patterns.
Annika Bacher is a PhD Candidate at the European University Institute (EUI). Her research focuses on dynamic Macroeconomics, in particular how household and family structures shape financial decisions and labor market outcomes.