Household investment decisions and offspring gender: parental accounting

Numerous behavioural factors have been identified as having an impact on household stockholding decisions. Given there is both theoretical and empirical evidence to support the premise that offspring gender can influence specific types of parental preferences, I test the theory that offspring gender has an effect on parental investment decision-making. I find that offspring gender does influence household stock market participation. Specifically, I find that having only female offspring can significantly increase the probability of stockholding. Given stockholding can have large effects on household wealth levels and that family wealth levels affect intergenerational transfers, this finding could have important implications for understanding distributional welfare issues.