IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/oxf/wpaper/1025.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

That’s what she said: An Empirical Investigation on the Gender Gap in Inflation Expectations

Author

Listed:
  • Lovisa Reiche

Abstract

The gender gap in inflation expectations, i.e., women reporting systematically higher inflation expectations in consumer surveys, is a well-established phenomenon. The dis parity has been attributed to women’s greater involvement in grocery shopping and exposure to volatile food prices. I evaluate this hypothesis using a Bayesian learning framework, which suggests that signal volatility increases mean expectations only when ever the prior is flat. Such a flat prior could be caused by low financial literacy, which is more prevalent in women. Using data from the “Bundesbank Online Panel – House holds”, I find that grocery shopping increases expectations only for a low literacy sample and including a control for financial literacy closes the gender gap fully. This observation has significant macroeconomic implications, including potential gender-based disparities in retirement investment and monetary policy targeting.

Suggested Citation

  • Lovisa Reiche, 2023. "That’s what she said: An Empirical Investigation on the Gender Gap in Inflation Expectations," Economics Series Working Papers 1025, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:oxf:wpaper:1025
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b8a52d8f-7aa0-4e67-b488-c30c873dc764
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Annamaria Lusardi & Olivia S. Mitchell, 2008. "Planning and Financial Literacy: How Do Women Fare?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 98(2), pages 413-417, May.
    2. Reiche, Lovisa & Meyler, Aidan, 2022. "Making sense of consumer inflation expectations: the role of uncertainty," Working Paper Series 2642, European Central Bank.
    3. Gorodnichenko, Yuriy & Sergeyev, Dmitriy, 2021. "Zero Lower Bound on Inflation Expectations," IZA Discussion Papers 14853, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    4. Olivier Armantier & Giorgio Topa & Wilbert Van der Klaauw & Basit Zafar, 2017. "An overview of the Survey of Consumer Expectations," Economic Policy Review, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, issue 23-2, pages 51-72.
    5. Rüdiger Bachmann & Tim O. Berg & Eric R. Sims, 2015. "Inflation Expectations and Readiness to Spend: Cross-Sectional Evidence," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 7(1), pages 1-35, February.
    6. Christopher A Sims, 2009. "Inflation expectations, uncertainty and monetary policy," BIS Working Papers 275, Bank for International Settlements.
    7. Lamla, Michael J. & Lein, Sarah M., 2014. "The role of media for consumers’ inflation expectation formation," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 106(C), pages 62-77.
    8. Abildgren, Kim & Kuchler, Andreas, 2021. "Revisiting the inflation perception conundrum," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 67(C).
    9. Olivier Armantier & Wändi Bruine de Bruin & Simon Potter & Giorgio Topa & Wilbert van der Klaauw & Basit Zafar, 2013. "Measuring Inflation Expectations," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 5(1), pages 273-301, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Francesco D'Acunto & Janet Gao & Lu Liu & Kai Lu & Zhengwei Wang & Jun Yang, 2025. "Subjective Expectations and Financial Intermediation," CESifo Working Paper Series 11780, CESifo.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Christopher Roth & Johannes Wohlfart, 2020. "How Do Expectations about the Macroeconomy Affect Personal Expectations and Behavior?," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 102(4), pages 731-748, October.
    2. Lena Dräger & Michael J. Lamla, 2024. "Consumers' macroeconomic expectations," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38(2), pages 427-451, April.
    3. Young Bin Ahn & Yoichi Tsuchiya, 2022. "Consumer’s perceived and expected inflation in Japan—irrationality or asymmetric loss?," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 63(3), pages 1247-1292, September.
    4. Hayo, Bernd & Méon, Pierre-Guillaume, 2023. "Measuring Household Inflation Perceptions and Expectations: The Effect of Guided vs Non-Guided Inflation Questions," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 78(C).
    5. Alberto Cavallo & Guillermo Cruces & Ricardo Perez-Truglia, 2017. "Inflation Expectations, Learning, and Supermarket Prices: Evidence from Survey Experiments," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 9(3), pages 1-35, July.
    6. Armantier, Olivier & Sbordone, Argia & Topa, Giorgio & van der Klaauw, Wilbert & Williams, John C., 2022. "A new approach to assess inflation expectations anchoring using strategic surveys," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 129(S), pages 82-101.
    7. Armantier, Olivier & Filippin, Antonio & Neubauer, Michael & Nunziata, Luca, 2022. "The expected price of keeping up with the Joneses," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 200(C), pages 1203-1220.
    8. Gonzalez-Fernandez, Pedro & Bosch-Rosa, Ciril & Meissner, Thomas, 2025. "Direct Elicitation of Parametric Belief Distributions: An application to inflation expectations," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 233(C).
    9. Alberto Cavallo & Guillermo Cruces & Ricardo Perez-Truglia, 2014. "Inflation Expectations, Learning and Supermarket Prices," NBER Working Papers 20576, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    10. Xu, Yingying & Chang, Hsu-Ling & Lobonţ, Oana-Ramona & Su, Chi-Wei, 2016. "Modeling heterogeneous inflation expectations: empirical evidence from demographic data?," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 57(C), pages 153-163.
    11. Sarantis Tsiaplias, 2021. "Consumer inflation expectations, income changes and economic downturns," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 36(6), pages 784-807, September.
    12. Crump, Richard K. & Eusepi, Stefano & Tambalotti, Andrea & Topa, Giorgio, 2022. "Subjective intertemporal substitution," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 126(C), pages 118-133.
    13. Schnorpfeil, Philip & Weber, Michael & Hackethal, Andreas, 2023. "Households' response to the wealth effects of inflation," SAFE Working Paper Series 400, Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE.
    14. Lena Dräger & Ulrich Fritsche, 2013. "Don't Worry, Be Right! Survey Wording Effects on In flation Perceptions and Expectations," Macroeconomics and Finance Series 201308, University of Hamburg, Department of Socioeconomics.
    15. Francesco D’Acunto & Daniel Hoang & Michael Weber, 2022. "Managing Households’ Expectations with Unconventional Policies," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 35(4), pages 1597-1642.
    16. Binder, Carola C., 2017. "Measuring uncertainty based on rounding: New method and application to inflation expectations," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 90(C), pages 1-12.
    17. Francesco D'Acunto & Janet Gao & Lu Liu & Kai Lu & Zhengwei Wang & Jun Yang, 2025. "Subjective Expectations and Financial Intermediation," CESifo Working Paper Series 11780, CESifo.
    18. Peter Andrebriq & Carlo Pizzinelli & Christopher Roth & Johannes Wohlfart, 2022. "Subjective Models of the Macroeconomy: Evidence From Experts and Representative Samples," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 89(6), pages 2958-2991.
    19. Conrad, Christian & Enders, Zeno & Glas, Alexander, 2022. "The role of information and experience for households’ inflation expectations," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 143(C).

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oxf:wpaper:1025. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Anne Pouliquen The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask Anne Pouliquen to update the entry or send us the correct address (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sfeixuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.