Jenny Säve-Söderbergh

Financial Literacy and Retirement Planning in Sweden

We examine the relationship between financial literacy and retirement planning in a representative sample of Swedish adults. We find significant differences in financial literacy between planners and non-planners. Financial literacy levels are also lower among older people, women and those with low education or earnings. When we control for demographic variables we do not find an association between a narrow measure of financial literacy and planning, but with a broader measure the association is positive and statistically significant. We relate these findings to features of the Swedish pension system.

Self-Directed Pensions: Gender, Risk, and Portfolio Choices*

In this paper, I investigate gender differences in financial risk�?taking from a new perspective, and I show that gender plays a different role across the risk distribution. To evaluate risk�?taking, I exploit portfolio choices following a reform that entitles almost the entire Swedish workforce to choose a risk profile for a part of their public�?pension contributions. The novel finding is that portfolio risk does not differ much between the men and women who choose less risky portfolios, while the men who choose risky portfolios take on significantly more risk than do the women who choose risky portfolios. The findings are robust to investors choosing the default alternative, chasing past returns, rebalancing, and different measures of risk�?taking.

Children Do Not Behave Like Adults: Gender Gaps in Performance and Risk Taking within a Random Social Context in the High-Stakes Game Shows Jeopardy and Junior Jeopardy

Using unique panel data, we compare cognitive performance and wagering behavior of children (10-11 years) with adults playing in the Swedish version of the TV-shows Jeopardy and Junior Jeopardy. Although facing the same well-known high-stakes game, and controlling for performance differences, there is no gender gap in risk-taking among girls and boys in contrast with adults, and, while girls take more risk than women, boys take less risk than men. We also find that female behavior is differently sensitive to social context. While women wager more, girls perform worse and employ inferior wagering strategies when randomly assigned male opponents.

Securing victory or not? Surrendering optimal play when facing simple calculations : a natural experiment from the Swedish and US Jeopardy

This article empirically investigates the common assumption of economic agents’ capabilities to process complex mathematical problems to find optimal strategies applied in economic modelling. By exploiting a design difference in the game show Jeopardy between the US and Sweden, we obtain a natural experiment of individuals facing an optimization decision either having explicit information or deriving it by noncomplex adding and subtracting. Given the assumption that individuals compute optimally, there should be no difference in the strategies used. Yet, the results show that even a small change in informational pre-conditions for obtaining an optimal strategy strongly alters economic-decision making.

Gender of the immediate manager and women's wages: The importance of managerial position

One argument for increasing female representation in management is the expectation that female managers will be particularly beneficial for female employees through, e.g., role modeling, mentoring or providing other incentives to enhance female productivity. We explore this issue by analyzing the association between womens wages and the gender of their immediate managers using Swedish matched employee-employer data from 2010. Contrary to the expected positive association, we find that wages are overall 3% lower for female employees with a female instead of male manager. However, dividing the sample by managerial position and controlling for the sorting of employees with respect to, e.g., non-cognitive traits, work tasks, family commitment and establishment gender composition, the negative association is found only for female employees working for lower-level managers, not for women with a manager at the highest rank. One possible explanation could be a difference in decision-making power if lower-level female managers have more limited resources for their subordinates compared to lower-level male managers.

Immediate Manager Gender and Wages of Female Employees: The Importance of Manager Position

One argument for increasing female representation in management is the anticipation that female managers will be particularly beneficial for female employees through, e.g., role modeling, mentoring or providing other incentives to enhance female productivity. We explore this issue by analyzing the association between female wages and the gender of their immediate managers using Swedish matched employee-employer data. Contrary to the expected positive association, we find that wages are overall 3% lower for female employees with a female instead of male manager. However, dividing the sample by managerial position, and controlling for important sorting of employees with respect to, e.g., non-cognitive traits, work tasks and establishment gender composition, the negative association is found only among female employees working for lower-level managers, not for a manager at the highest level of management. One possible explanation could thus be a difference in decision-making power if lower-level female managers have more limited resources for their subordinates compared to lower-level male managers.