fit2invest financial education game online

Together with Raiffeisen-Landesbank Steiermark AG, I spent the past year developing the financial education game fit2invest. Publicly available under fit2invest.at, the German-language game takes players back to sometime in the last 50 years of mark history and lets them experience (and make decisions in) the stock and bond markets.

Players have to dynamically shift their investments between the markets and a savings account and only at the end of the game learn which time period they just experienced. Once the players have played the game at least once, they get access to the "training area" in which users can learn about such diverse finance topics as diversification, inflation, the effect of time on investment success, etc.

While the game currently addresses the general public as its audience, we are currently working on an education version, which teachers will be able to use in class to teach investment-related topics to their pupils.

New paper on insider trading regulation

Along with my co-authors Dominik Schmidt and Thomas Stöckl, we examined traders’ regulation preferences conditional on their prospects of becoming informed. Our findings reveal that traders voted against regulation in 64% of referenda. Moreover, traders’ prospects of becoming informed significantly impacted the outcomes of the referenda. Individual votes reveal that traders who know they will remain uninformed support regulation in 69.27% of the cases, while informed traders do so only 8.33% of the time. Traders who may or may not become informed support regulation 33.33% of the time.

Link to the paper (open access)

New video about non-standard errors

The team behind a recent Journal of Finance paper has posted a video explaining the concept of non-standard errors. This is a vital piece of research for researchers across all fields, and I highly recommend giving it a watch.

The video provides a succinct explanation of non-standard errors. In contrast to standard errors, which represent the variability in statistical estimates when samples are randomly drawn from a population, non-standard errors occur when different research teams analyzing the same sample make diverse decisions along the analysis path, leading to variability in estimates.

In an experiment involving 164 research teams that I was a part of, we demonstrated that non-standard errors are at least as large as standard errors. This highlights the dual sources of uncertainty in any given estimate: standard error (variability with different samples) and non-standard error (variability with different teams analyzing the same data).

Visit https://nonstandarderrors.com/ for further information and the video.

Paper on sustainable investments

Together with researchers from Vienna, Stavanger and Brussels, I recently published a paper titled "Can information provision and preference elicitation promote ESG investments? Evidence from a large, incentivized online experiment" in the Journal of Banking and Finance. We study the role that providing information about financial returns and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) impacts plays in influencing investors' decisions towards sustainable investments.

Our research reveals that both financial return information and ESG impact information stimulate investors towards ESG investments. Interestingly, combining these two types of information does not enhance the effect beyond presenting either one alone. This insight is crucial for financial advisors and institutions looking to promote ESG investments among their clients, as it suggests a targeted approach to information provision can be effective.

Link to the paper (open access)

Paper on migration policy and labor market integration

In a bit of a departure from my usual research topics, I supervised the PhD project of Kerstin Mitterbacher. Together with co-supervisor Jürgen Fleiß, we conducted experiments studying the interaction between economic migrants and the citizens in the country the migrants move to. In the first paper on this topic that has now been published, we report clear evidence of reciprocity between the two groups - the more willing destination country citizens are to allow migrants to integrate (and refrain from discriminating against them), the more willing migrants are to contribute to the social security and welfare systems in the destination country.

Link to the paper (open access)

See the blog for further updates.