It is acknowledged by a large volume of research in the past two decades that emotions play an essential role in individuals' life; a role which also encroaches upon the realm of financial decision-making. The project "Athena vs Lyssa" wants to provide further evidence for such a role by means of an experimental approach with salient monetary incentives and an analysis based on sound methodological criteria. However, its ambitions are not limited to this. Indeed, the project aspires to uncover whether and to what extent financial literacy may divert such a process. The intuition behind this idea is that emotions matter for financial decision-making, but financial literacy, by making individuals more informed and cautious about their portfolio investments, may reduce the final relevance of emotions. Finally, the project's aims go even further in trying to assess whether there are gender differences in this process. The relevance of a gender perspective for the effect of emotions and financial literacy on financial decision-making is shown by simple statistics about gender gaps in longevity (women tend to live longer than men), in levels of participation in the labour market, in wages and pensions. This makes women¿s financial (in)security a non-negligible issue.
Our findings have important economic and educational policy implications.
From a public policy viewpoint, we believe that the findings from our project can popularise the need for more effective educational programs and policies aimed at improving investors' financial literacy and knowledge, not only at pre- and post-secondary levels but also from a lifelong learning perspective. Indeed, financial literacy plays a crucial role in economics behaviour, in particular when decisions on retirement plans and wealth accumulation are concerned, as it contributes to enhance the quality of individual investors¿ decisions and increase investors' confidence and participation in capital markets.
From a gender perspective, increasing the level of financial knowledge is crucial, since women tend to outlive men and are likely to spend some time in widowhood. As a result, improving women's financial literacy is the key to help them prepare for retirement and promote their financial security.
Moreover, our analysis, by paying attention to intra-sex variability and to the overlapping of the inter-sex distributions, has the potentiality to improve substantially on the objectivity of the economic research on financial decision-making and prevent the common gender stereotypes about risk taking in finance.