Annual Conference Videos

Keynote presentation: Darrell Duffie

Keynote presentation: Imène Rahmouni-Rousseau

Keynote presentation: Hyun Song Shin

Keynote presentation: Monika Piazzesi

Listen to Olivia Mitchell share her ideas and hopes for rebuilding retirement systems post Covid-19. Olivia Mitchell is the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans Professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She has a broad research agenda which includes public and private pensions, insurance and risk management, and financial literacy and public finance. 

Hear Professors Luis M. Viceira discuss how to build portfolios for long-horizon investors. Luis M. Viceira is the George E. Bates Professor at Harvard Business School. His research focuses on investment management and capital markets, in particular optimal portfolio choice for long-term investors, the impact of monetary policy on bond and equity market risk and the disruptive power of fintech in the asset management industry. Professor Viceira is currently a Governor (Public) of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).

How did the personal finances of Americans look like before the pandemic? Hear Annamaria Lusardi discuss key findings on how to understand personal finance in America. Annamaria Lusardi is the Professor of Economics and Accountancy at The George Washington University School of Business, where she also serves as the Academic Director of the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center. Professor Lusardi is widely regarded as one of the founders of the field of financial literacy, which studies how financial knowledge interacts with behaviours. She has also won numerous research awards, one of which is the Swedish Skandia Award for long-term savings in 2017.

Humans have limited attention. There is a lot going on and we can only pay attention to so much. Listen to Terrance Odean, the Rudd Family Foundation Professor and Chair of the Finance Group at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley present how attention drives the behaviour of investors and which factors drive the attention. Professor Odean is regularly commenting on current affairs as a Wall Street Journal expert panelist in connection with his work in behavioural finance. He is one of the most influential researchers in the field and has made numerous important contributions on how psychology interacts with human decision making in finance.

How can consumer welfare be improved in the financial markets? Hear our four distinguished panelists; Daniel Barr, Director General for the Swedish Pension Agency; Ninni Franceschi, Head of Private Banking Sweden for Nordea; Erik Thedeén, Director General at FI (Sweden’s financial supervisory authority); and Sven Hagströmer, Chairman of the Board Creades, Avanza share valuable insights and viable solutions to improve consumer welfare.

In today’s modern society, many households are seeking financial advice. At the same time, women’s share of financial wealth is increasing. When considering these two facts together it raises an important question: Are women receiving the same quality advice as men do? If not, why not? What are the mechanics and set of attributes which lead to these outcomes? Hear speaker Amit Kumar present the key findings from the paper ‘Do Women Receive Worse Financial Advice?,’ followed by a commentary by Tabea Bucher-Koenen.

Based on popular responses, the male spouse is typically in charge of investments such as pensions and personal loans, i.e. consequential decision-making in financial management within the household. Whereas females are typically left with day-to-day spending, i.e. short term decisions. Can gender norms, however, have material consequences on household welfare? Yes. And if the decision making process systematically excludes women regardless of their abilities, the overall efficiency may be compromised. Hear speaker Luana Zaccaria present the key findings from the paper ‘From Patriarchy to Partnership: Gender Equality and Household Finance,’ followed by a commentary by Anastasia Girshina.

There is mounting evidence that households make very costly financial mistakes when it comes to various aspects of their financial management. Given that these mistakes are costly, there have been active policy efforts to try to help households avoid some of the common biases and mistakes. Efforts ranging from investor education and greater disclosure to protective legislation and even optimal default. Hear speaker Denis Sosyura presents the key findings from the paper ‘Financial Media as a Money Doctor: Evidence from Refinancing Decisions.’ The presentation is followed by a commentary by Kasper Meisner Nielsen.

Over the past two decades, there has been a significant shift in the way in which we consume or access our personal financial information, such as account balances and recent transactions. Since the early 2010s, people have been able to use their mobile devices anytime and almost anywhere to access information about their personal finances. Given the change in technology and the magnitude of adoption of mobile devices and personal financial apps, Yaron Levi presents the key findings from the paper ‘Mind the App: Mobile Access to Financial Information and Consumer Behavior’. The presentation is followed by a commentary by Francesco D’Acunto.

Financial decision-making poses a lot of challenges for households and individuals. These challenges arise from an overall low financial literacy level, rooted in the fact that financial mistakes are persistent among individuals. On top of that, many financial firms’ shroud product specific attributes, or hide some product features to extract additional profit. Listen to speaker Olga Bakakina present the key findings from the paper ‘Unshrouding product-specific attributes through financial education’, followed by commentary by Ansgar Walther.

Over the last decade or so, more than a trillion dollars of structural financial products have been sold to households. Despite their popularity, there are two opposing views when it comes to the underlying motives for issuing these products. The traditional view suggests that they are issued for risk-sharing purposes. A more recent view, however, suggests that they are issued to exploit naive investors via complexity. Empirically, there is growing evidence for the exploitation-based view. Hear speaker Cameron Peng present the key findings from their paper and features about complex financial securities; the heterogeneous effects they have on investment performance and their redistributional purposes, followed by discussant Petra Vokata.

Over time, there has been a shift from the defined benefit (DB) to the defined contribution (DC) plan. The advantage of the DC plan is that, in theory, workers can pick their level of savings and the way in which the savings are invested. The drawback of that, however, is that if people lack financial literacy, workers could end up worse off than they were during the previous scheme. Hear Enrichetta Ravina present the main findings from their paper including an estimate of the evolution of workers’ savings and investment decisions, for which they use actual past behaviour and observable characteristics instead of a structural life-cycle model. The presentation is followed by commentary by Giulio Fella.

Psychologists and economists have studied overconfidence for many years. It is perhaps the most well-established bias towards which human judgement is vulnerable. Overconfidence can influence behavioural choices in profound ways. Theoretically, researchers know that overconfident investors' are likely to trade too aggressively, diversify less and perform worse. Listen to speaker Xing Huang present the main findings from their paper and how overconfidence relates to margin investors, followed by discussant Yigitcan Karabulut.