This study investigates the role of gender in financial risk-taking. Specifically, I ask whether female investors tend to fund less risky investment projects than males. To answer this question, I use real-life investment data collected at the largest German market for peer-to-peer lending. Investors' utility is assumed to be a function of the projects expected return and its standard deviation, whereas ...
The study analyses the gender pay gap in private-sector management positions in Germany based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) for the years 2001-2008. It focuses in particular on gender segregation in the labor market, that is, on the unequal distribution of women and men across different occupations and on the effects of this inequality on earnings levels and gender wage ...
The aim of this paper is to study the short and long-term fertility effects of mass violent conflict on different population sub-groups. The authors pool three nationally representative demographic and health surveys from before and after the genocide in Rwanda, identifying conflict exposure of the survivors in multiple ways. The analysis finds a robust effect of genocide on fertility, with a strong ...
Using unique survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, this study examines the influence of reciprocal inclinations on workers' sorting into codetermined firms. Employees with strong negative reciprocal inclinations are more likely to work in firms with a works council while employees with strong positive reciprocal inclinations are less likely to work in such firms. We argue that these findings ...
The executive boards1 of Germany's 200 largest companies are still almost all male. In 2010, women occupied only 3.2% of all board seats. This negligible percentage is even lower in the top 100 and DAX30 companies, which are only 2.2% female, despite a voluntary commitment dating back to 2001, in which companies promised to give more women access to senior positions. A similar, although less extreme ...
Despite the recent financial crisis and widespread mergers in the banking industry, the German financial sector remains largely unchanged in one respect: the percentage of women on the corporate boards of Germany's banks and insurance companies was nearly as low in 2010 as in the pre-crisis years. As a result, German companies have left the potential for innovation that has been shown to accompany ...
Gregariousness is an important aspect of human life with implications for labour market outcomes. The paper examines, to the best of our knowledge for the first time for Germany, gregariousness and social interaction at the workplace and associated wage differentials. Our empirical findings with samples from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) demonstrate that gregarious people more often work in ...
This study investigates whether gender discrimination is taking place in an innovative credit market known as peer-to-peer lending. Based on the data of the largest German peer-to-peer lending platform, we observe that female borrowers pay on average higher interest rates than males despite the fact that the two gender groups do not differ with respect to their credit risk. Our analysis shows however ...