Previous literature suggests males tend to perceive lower risks than females. We revisit this gender difference by studying the interaction of gender with other observable characteristics in a survey of forecasting future stock prices. We find that some observable characteristics such as culture, age, and uncertainty of stock prices have a different effect on the risk perception between females and males. This additional source (“coefficient effects”) of gender difference is distinct from the differences in personal characteristics (“characteristics effects”). We disentangle these two sources of gender differences in risk perception by applying the Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition technique. We find that characteristics effects and coefficient effects are both important, and the latter can be even more important than the former.

先前的文献表明，男性比女性更容易感觉到风险。我们通过在预测未来股票价格的调查中研究性别与其他可观察特征的相互作用来重新审视这种性别差异。我们发现，某些可观察到的特征（例如文化，年龄和股票价格的不确定性）对男女之间的风险感知有不同的影响。性别差异的这一额外来源（“系数效应”）不同于个人特征的差异（“特征效应”）。通过应用Blinder-Oaxaca分解技术，我们可以区分这两种性别差异在风险感知中的来源。我们发现，特征效应和系数效应都很重要，而后者可能比前者更为重要。