Economics BEAT Seminar - Berivan Gürel

Berivan Gürel is visiting the University of Exeter Business School on Tuesday 27 October for an Economics BEAT seminar. She's coming over from the University of Graz to present her paper, 'Gender/Sex Differences in the Impact of Salient Financial Cues on Investment Decisions', which looks at how the way financial information is presented can sway the decisions people make when investing.

The work sits on a pre-registered, incentivised online experiment with 1,336 participants — 990 cisgender and 346 non-cisgender — who were asked to evaluate stock price charts. The charts varied in what they highlighted: some showed the stock's 52-week high, while others showed the share of analyst buy recommendations. To measure gender and sexuality, Gürel used a four-item short form of the Multidimensional Gender and Sexuality Inventory (MGSI).

What comes out of the data is a bit of a challenge to the usual assumptions. After correcting for multiple testing, none of the 72 MGSI coefficients survived. And while cisgender women and men did differ in how they self-reported their own risk tolerance, they didn't differ in any of the incentivised outcomes. That suggests that sex differences in risk-taking might depend more on how risk preferences are elicited than on any fixed difference between the groups. There's also a point about how we read the charts themselves: participants' risk estimates rose with the historical volatility shown, but those estimates were markedly overprecise.

It's the kind of session that works well if you've ever wondered why two people can look at the same set of numbers and come to completely different conclusions about what's a safe bet. The seminar runs from 1:30 pm to 2:45 pm in XFi Conference Room 2 at the University of Exeter Business School, on the Streatham Campus.