Gender spenders
Many Americans went into personal debt before the economic recession hit the country in 2008. Why? For some men, the biggest factor may have been intense competition to find a spouse.That’s the suggestion of a new study co-authored by an MIT professor that analyzes the ways social settings can affect people’s propensity to save or spend money. Geographic areas with unusually high ratios of men to women, as the study notes, are correlated with high levels of personal debt; in follow-up lab experiments, the researchers found that men are more willing to spend money quickly in social settings with marked gender imbalances. “There is reason to believe that men are making financial decisions in a way that reflects the influence of the ratios of men and women,” says Joshua Ackerman, an assistant professor of marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management and one of the researchers who performed the...