Economics BEAT Seminar - Berivan Gürel (University of Graz)

Tuesday, 27 October 2026 at 13:30

The title of my talk is "Gender/Sex Differences in the Impact of Salient Financial Cues on Investment Decisions", and please find the abstract below:

Event details

Research on gender and financial decision-making typically compares women and men and thereby treats gender as binary. We examine whether gender and sexuality, measured along multiple dimensions, shape how investors form beliefs and allocate capital in response to salient financial cues. In a pre-registered, incentivized online experiment, 1,336 participants—990 cisgender and 346 non-cisgender—evaluate stock price charts that vary in whether they display the stock's 52-week high or the share of analyst buy recommendations. For each chart, participants state return and risk expectations and an investment allocation. We measure gender and sexuality with a four-item short form of the Multidimensional Gender and Sexuality Inventory (MGSI) and estimate the three outcomes jointly in a seemingly unrelated regression system. None of the 72 MGSI coefficients survives a correction for multiple testing, neither as unconditional differences nor as moderators of the two cues. Consistent with this null result, cisgender women and men differ in self-reported risk tolerance but not in any incentivized outcome, suggesting that sex differences in risk-taking depend on how risk preferences are elicited. Participants' risk estimates increase with the historical volatility shown in the chart, but are markedly overprecise: in 98% of cases, the stated return intervals are narrower than the 95% interval implied by the stock's subsequent realized volatility. This overprecision is common to all groups and unrelated to gender and sexuality.

Organiser

University of Exeter Business School - Economics

Location

XFi Conference Room 2