DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES Culture, Gender, and Financial Literacy

Any of the and of IZA. in series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. aims to answers to the global labor challenges of our time. Our key objective to build between academic research, policymakers and ABSTRACT Using a nationally representative US sample of 9,623 adults from 27 countries of ancestries, we find that the higher the degree of gender convergence in financial knowledge in the country of ancestry, the higher the financial knowledge of women in the US relative to their male counterparts. After ruling out gender differences in cognitive and non-cognitive skills as potential mechanisms, we find that higher patience and lower altruism in the country of ancestry are associated with greater financial knowledge for men but not for women in the US. Once we remove any country-of-ancestry gender variation from these preferences, gender convergence in financial knowledge continues to be associated with women’s (relative and absolute) greater financial literacy in the US, underscoring that gender differences in financial literacy are socially constructed. This relative and absolute female improvement is particularly robust for knowledge related to inflation and risk-diversification. with no impact on these suggest that: (1) cultural regarding gender convergence in financial knowledge beyond those associated with and and absolute) greater financial literacy the and relative and absolute female