Systematic differences in the attitudes of men and women towards risk is well established. In this paper, we investigate the joint role of two prominent psychological characteristics in explaining this difference. Our starting point is that risk assessments can be thought of, in general terms, to combine beliefs about the probability of negative outcomes occurring with a subjective valuation of how painful that negative outcome would be. Exploiting large-scale panel data from the United Kingdom, we find that gender differences in financial optimism and financial loss aversion – the stronger psychological response to monetary losses than monetary gains – explain a substantial proportion of the parallel gender difference in willingness to take risks. This result prevails even after controlling for the Big Five personality traits, suggesting that the prominent psychological characteristics capture different aspects of behaviour than the Big Five.

中文翻译：

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乐观、损失厌恶和风险态度方面的性别差异

男性和女性对风险的态度存在系统性差异，这是众所周知的。在本文中，我们研究了两个突出的心理特征在解释这种差异方面的共同作用。我们的出发点是，一般而言，风险评估可以被认为是将对发生负面结果的可能性的信念与对负面结果的痛苦程度的主观评估结合起来。利用英国的大规模面板数据，我们发现，财务乐观和财务损失厌恶方面的性别差异（对金钱损失的心理反应比对金钱收益的心理反应更强烈）解释了冒险意愿方面平行性别差异的很大一部分。即使在控制了大五人格特征之后，这一结果仍然存在，这表明突出的心理特征捕捉到了与大五人格特征不同的行为方面。