A gender difference in risk preferences, with women being more averse to risky choices, is a robust experimental finding. Speculating on the sources of this difference, Croson and Gneezy recently pointed to the tendency for women to experience emotions more strongly and suggested that feeling more strongly about negative outcomes would lead to greater risk-aversion. Here we test this hypothesis in an international survey with 424 respondents from India and 416 from US where we ask questions about a hypothetical lottery. In both countries we find that emotions about outcomes are stronger among women, and that this effect partially mediates gender difference in willingness to enter the lottery.

Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (N � 17,637). On responses to the Big Five Inventory, women reported higher levels of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than did men across most nations. These findings converge with previous studies in which different Big Five measures and more limited samples of nations were used. Overall, higher levels of human development—including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth—were the main nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality. Changes in men’s personality traits appeared to be the primary cause of sex difference variation across cultures. It is proposed that heightened levels of sexual dimorphism result from personality traits of men and women being less constrained and more able to naturally diverge in developed nations. In less fortunate social and economic conditions, innate personality differences between men and women may be attenuated.

Web-based financial commentary, in which experts routinely express market-related thought processes, is proposed as a means for college students to learn vicariously about financial markets. Undergraduate business school students from a regional university were exposed to expert market commentary from a single financial Web site for a 6week period. When compared to a control group, students in the experimental group were found to possess higher levels of financial market awareness. Degree of engagement, as approximated by measures of project exposure time and effort, was significantly related to market awareness. Finance majors were found to be more engaged in the process than nonfinance majors. Although this study should be considered exploratory in nature, findings support the notion of using Web-based vicarious learning processes in financial education. Future research can extend the generalizability of these findings, as well as shape vicarious learning mechanisms for use across business disciplines.

Many important economic decisions involve financial risk, and there is substantial evidence that women tend to be more risk averse than men. We explore a potential biological basis of the variation in risk-taking within and between men and women using an emerging measure of prenatal androgrens, the ratio between the length of the second and fourth digits (2D:4D). A smaller 2D:4D ratio has been linked to higher exposure to prenatal testosterone relative to estradiol, with men having lower ratios than women on average. In an individual decision-making task with financial stakes, we find that both men and women with smaller 2D:4D ratios chose significantly riskier options. We further find that the 2D:4D ratio can partially explain the overall difference in risktaking between men and women. Moreover, for men and women at the extreme ends of the digitratio distribution the difference in risk-taking disappears entirely. Thus, the 2D:4D ratio can at least partially explain variation in financially motivated risk-taking behavior both within and between sexes and offers strong evidence of a biological basis of attitudes toward risk-taking.