Abstract: There is abundant evidence on the gender wage gaps across countries, but much less is known about the gender differences in personal wealth. This paper provides comparative estimates of the gender wealth gaps for 21 European countries, employing data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey. A common problem for studies focusing on this topic is that the data on wealth are usually provided at the household level and not at the individual level. This means it is only possible to estimate gender wealth gaps for single-person households. To overcome this constraint, we propose a novel approach using a model averaging methodology to predict individualised wealth data for multi-person households. We find that the gender wealth gaps tend to be in favour of men in the whole population, especially when estimated at the top of the wealth distribution. In contrast, the estimated gaps in the subset of single-person households tend to be statistically insignificant. The country-level gender wealth gaps are correlated with overall wealth inequality but not with gender gaps in pay and employment

JEL Classification: D31, G51, J16, J71

Keywords: gender gap, imputation, model averaging, wealth distribution, inequality, intra-household allocation of wealth, household finance, Europe

The public research seminars of the Department of Economics and Finance (DEF) at Tallinn University of Technology  usually take place on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month in both onsite and online format, unless announced otherwise. The presentation will last approximately 45 minutes followed by 15 minutes of discussion. The seminars are held in English. Copies of the paper are usually made available at the seminar. The DEF seminar series is organised in collaboration with the project ”Individual Behaviour and Economic  Performance: Methodological  Challenges and Institutional Context” (IBEP), which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 952574. Questions about the seminar can be sent to the IBEP seminar coordinator Rachatar Nilavongse, rachatar.nilavongse@taltech.ee.