The Gender Wealth Gap in Europe: Application of Machine Learning to Predict Individual‐level Wealth
利用机器学习方法从家庭调查数据中预测个人财富，估计22个欧洲国家的性别财富差距，发现男性平均比女性多24%财富，且高住房拥有率与较小的国家层面性别财富差距相关。
Abstract This article provides comparative estimates of the gender wealth gaps for 22 European countries, employing data from the Household Finance and Consumption Survey. The data on wealth are collected at the household level, while individual‐level data are needed for the estimates of gender wealth gaps. We propose a novel approach using machine learning and model averaging methods to predict individual‐level wealth data for multi‐person households. Our results suggest that random forest performs best as the predicting tool for this exercise, outperforming elastic net and Bayesian model averaging. The estimated gender wealth gaps tend to be in favor of men, especially at the top of the wealth distribution. Men have 24 percent more wealth than women on average. We also find that a high home ownership rate is associated with a smaller country‐level gender wealth gap. Our estimates suggest that the individual‐level wealth inequality is on average 3 pp higher than the household‐level wealth inequality in multi‐member households.