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.

本文研究了净财富中的性别差距。我们使用与爱沙尼亚家庭财务和消费调查相关的财富管理数据，该调查提供了所有家庭类型的个人级财富数据。平均财富的无条件性别差距为45％，但这种巨大的均值差距主要来自于分布的顶部，在该分布区中，男性比女性拥有更多的财富，而在统计上，最低端的大多数国家中，性别的差异并不显着财富五分位数。在分配的顶部，财富的差异可以用男人更大的自谋职业来解释。男性比女性拥有更多的商业财富，而性别财富差距是此类资产类别中最大的。不同家庭类型之间的性别财富差距非常不同。在已婚夫妇的大部分财富分配中，无条件的财富差距都强烈支持男人。另一方面，对于单身家庭，在财富分配的下半部分，原始差距有利于妇女。这些相反方向上的原始差距主要可以通过已婚夫妇与单身男人之间观察到的男女特征的差异来解释。