Stefan Palan

I am a financial economist with research interests in the fields of behavioral and experimental finance, experimental economics and scientific methodology.

I am currently Associate Professor of Finance and head of the Department of Finance at the University of Graz as well as lecturer at the University of Innsbruck and at Management Center Innsbruck. I am also editor-in-chief of the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance (IF 4.7), coordinator of the Finance Research Platform Graz, and scientific director of the Max Jung Lab Graz.

Department of FinanceUniversity of GrazUniversitaetsstrasse 15/F28010 GrazAustria
E: stefan.palan@uni-graz.atT: +43(316)380-7306Born @ 333.40ppm CO2

Media and policy attention

White house report mentions my research

2025-10-02

As I was recently made aware, a 2024 report by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy cites my paper "Nobel and novice: Author prominence affects peer review" (joint work with Jürgen Huber, Sabiou Inoua, Rudi Kerschbamer, Christian König-Kersting and Vernon Smith). The Biden administration report highlights efforts to enhance data accessibility and discusses the importance of establishing robust peer review systems for data to ensure its credibility within the research community. The report references our study in the context of discussing biases in the peer review process.

Honorary membership

2025-06-12

In its 2025 general assembly, the Society for Experimental Finance named me its Honorary Member. I am very grateful of this recognition - an honor that I now share with Nobel prize laureate Vernon Smith and the two founders of the society, Jürgen Huber and Michael Kirchler. The Society for Experimental Finance is an association of academic researchers in experimental finance. It was founded in 2013 and today has around 500 members, and it was my honor to serve it first as Secretary (2013-2018) and then as Managing Director (2021-2025).

Grant for studying the role of gender and sexuality in financial decision-making

2024-12-19

My joint grant application with Berivan Gürel (University of Graz) titled “Gender and Sex Dynamics in Financial Behavior - Experimental Evidence” has received nearly €300k funding from the Austrian Central Bank's (OeNB) Anniversary Fund. The project will generate insights into the interactions between gender/sex on the one hand, and risk perception, risk preferences, and risk-taking on the other hand. Helena Fornwagner (University of Exeter Business School), an Associate of the Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO), Felix Holzmeister (University of Innsbruck) and Julia Rose (Erasmus School of Economics) are the cooperation partners of this project. I look forward to sharing results with you!

New paper on the post-earnings announcement drift

2024-09-12

The last paper of my former PhD student Josef Fink's thesis, titled "Trading frictions and the Post-Earnings-Announcement Drift", has been accepted for publication at the Journal of Economics and Business. In it, we study the effect of trading frictions - specifically short selling and margin purchasing bans as well as a transaction fee - on the post-earnings announcement drift. While we find less trading activity and higher prices in the presence of frictions, the strength of the drift is not materially affected.

Link to the paper (open access)

Link to an AI-generated audio deep-dive into the paper

fit2invest financial education game online

2024-09-09

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 market 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.

Image copyright: Raiffeisen-Landesbank Steiermark AG.

A smartphone that shows a gaming screen. At the top of the screen there is a price chart, then follows some news about the 9/11 terrorist attacks and then follows the picture of a person who asks the user to make a forecast.

New paper on insider trading regulation

2024-09-09

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

2024-07-25

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.

A screenshot from a video about nonstandard errors, showing the text "Nonstandard errors".

Paper on sustainable investments

2024-03-11

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)

See the blog for further updates.

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