WIIW The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies - Wiener Institut für Internationale Wirtschaftsvergleiche

Alyssa Schneebaum

This paper studies the gap in wealth holdings between male and female single households using 2010 Household Finance and Consumption Survey data for 10 European countries. The analysis employs OLS and quantile regressions and finds that there is no wealth gap across most of the wealth distribution, but that male households have between 30% and 76% more net wealth than female households at the very top of the distribution. Differences in labor market characteristics, in particular earnings and the ownership of business assets, explain much of the difference in the gender wealth gap between the 70^th and 90^th percentiles.