How does gender really affect investment behavior?

In this paper we study gender differences in investment behavior. By making use of a dedicated proprietary dataset including 2374 clients of an Italian bank we show that, after controlling for socio-demographic and economic variables, gender still explains many differences in the investment decision process, risk preferences and portfolio characteristics, thus suggesting a role of gender in the investment behavior. However, no difference is revealed in the portfolio liquidity and diversification, meaning that gender does not affect the quality of portfolios. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.