Publication Type
Working Paper
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
8-2020
Abstract
We arranged for trained undercover men and women to pose as potential clients and visit all 65 local financial advisory firms in Hong Kong. At financial planning firms, but not at securities firms, women were more likely than men to receive advice to buy only individual or only local securities. Women clients who signaled that they were highly confident, highly risk tolerant or had a domestic outlook, were especially likely to receive this suboptimal advice. Our theoretical model explains these patterns as the result of statistical discrimination interacting with advisors’ incentives. Taste-based discrimination is unlikely to explain the results.
Keywords
audit study, gender, financial advice, securities firm, financial planner, risk tolerance, confidence, geographic outlook
Discipline
Finance | Finance and Financial Management
Research Areas
Finance
Publication
Journal of Finance
First Page
1
Last Page
87
Publisher
HKUST Business School Research Paper No. 2020-007
Citation
BHATTACHARYA, Utpal; KUMAR, Amit; VISARIA, Sujata; and ZHAO, Jing.
Do women receive worse financial advice?. (2020). Journal of Finance. 1-87.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/7042
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Comments
Forthcoming at The Journal of Finance