WOULD more women on the trading floor inject a dose of sanity into the world’s financial markets? This question gained prominence after the 2007-08 crisis. As Christine Lagarde, then France’s finance minister and now head of the IMF, quipped, had Lehman Brothers been Lehman Sisters, history would have been different. Many studies support this idea, showing that testosterone-laden men are prone to overconfidence in trading. Women are more cautious.

But things may not be so simple. Previous research has mostly used evidence from the West. To test if the conclusions apply universally, Wang Jianxin of China’s Central South University, Daniel Houser of George Mason University and Xu Hui of Beijing Normal University looked at both America and China. And they found that in China’s markets, women can be just as manic as men.

The economists arranged for 342 students to form experimental markets. They were allocated dividend-paying shares and tokens (in lieu of cash), and given 15 rounds to trade within gender-based groups. Participants could, in theory, calculate fair value of the shares in any given round but few did so.