Brown Bag seminar in Economics | Misperceived Returns to Active Investing with Ole-Andreas Elvik Næss

Welcome to the Brown Bag Seminar in Economics organized by the Department of Economics, SSE. The seminar speaker is Ole-Andreas Elvik Næss, NHH, presenting "Misperceived Returns to Active Investing: Evidence From a Field Experiment Among Retail Investors". We conduct a field experiment with a sample of retail investors. Treated respondents are 17.4 percentage points more likely to think that index funds will outperform active funds in the future. Our main result is that treated respondents increase the index fund share of their portfolio by 4.6 percentage points (39 percent) relative to control group respondents.

Start time: 2022-05-16 at 12:05

End time: 2022-05-16 at 13:00

Location: Sveavägen 65, room 342

The seminar speaker is Ole Næss, NHH & SSE, who will present "Misperceived Returns to Active Investing: Evidence From a Field Experiment Among Retail Investors".

Abstract

We conduct a field experiment with a sample of retail investors. We first elicit beliefs about the returns to active investing. We then generate exogenous variation in beliefs by providing treated respondents with information about index funds historically outperforming active funds. Treated respondents are 17.4 percentage points more likely to think that index funds will outperform active funds in the future. Four months after the experiment, we collect data on the survey respondents' portfolio allocations. Our main result is that treated respondents increase the index fund share of their portfolio by 4.6 percentage points (39 percent) relative to control group respondents.

Ole-Andreas Elvik Næss is a postdoc at the Centre for Applied Research at Samfunns- og næringslivsforskning (SNF), Norwegian School of Economics (NHH), and the Department of Economics at SSE. Ole-Andreas' research interests include: Political Economy, Household Finance, Media Economics and Public Economics.