Blog

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 working paper

Journal impact factor

The Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance (JBEF), which I have been co-editing since 2018, received an updated impact factor of 6.6 for 2022. This places the journal at rank 8 out of 111 finance journals and rank 30 out of 380 economics journals. In addition to the CiteScore of 9.0 (rank 18/302 in Finance) and ABDC-list ranking of "A", this is strong confirmation of the journal's very satisfying performance.

I wish to thank all associate editors, editorial board members, reviewers and authors who have made this amazing result possible!

Re-elected as Managing Director

The Society for Experimental Finance (SEF) held its 2023 conference in Sofia, Bulgaria. I am honored that the general assembly of members saw fit to re-elect Anita Kopányi-Peuker, Sascha Füllbrunn and myself to serve another two years as Treasurer, Secretary and Managing Director, respectively. We recently were able to sign a cooperation agreement between the SEF and the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance and as the biggest project for our upcoming term, we have recently set in motion the process of designing a completely new website for the Society. The website will not only be much nicer to look at and offer a much more modern user experience, but will also centralize most of the Society's outward-facing IT services in one unified system.

Talking about sustainability at financial planner congress

I recently gave a talk at the Financial Planner Forum 2023, held at Merriott Hotel, Vienna. Speaking in front of around 300 financial professionals, I was able to present my joint research with Marcel Seifert, Florian Spitzer, Simone Haeckl, Alexia Gaudeul, Erich Kirchler and Katharina Gangl studying ways to promote sustainable investments in the wake of the EU's Green Deal Action Plan on Sustainable Finance. I was glad my remarks were so well-received and a number of participants reached out to me following my talk. Many thanks to Prof. Otto Lucius for inviting me to speak at this 10th anniversary of the Financial Planner Forum.

Earnings autocorrelation drives post-earnings-announcement drift

A paper recently accepted in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis studies the post-earnings-announcement drift. Together with my co-authors, Josef Fink and Erik Theissen, we are the first to use experiments to study this well-documented market anomaly. Specifically, we focus on the question of whether post-earnings-announcement drift is driven by investors insufficiently accounting for autocorrelation in companies' earnings announcements.

The paper first documents that post-earnings-announcement drift can be observed in the controlled environment of the experimental lab, opening the door to future experiments studying this and other mispricing anomalies. In our second and main result, we then show that, while prices drift even in the absence of earnings autocorrelation, the drift is considerably more pronounced in the presence of earnings autocorrelation. The specific price patterns observed suggest that the phenomenon is indeed driven by underreaction to autocorrelation. Finally, we report that - at least in our lab setting - the observed drift can be exploited to earn excess profits. (link to the paper)

The study is part of a larger research project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) that has so far generated two published papers, two that are under review, and two that we are planning to submit to a journal soon.

"Non-standard errors" forthcoming in Journal of Finance

Together with my colleagues in Graz, Andrea Schertler and Erik Theissen, and another 340 authors around the globe, I recently participated in a large (obviously), cooperative, international research project to study "non-standard errors". As a member of one of more than 160 one- or two-researcher teams, I analyzed the same dataset of financial market transactions with the aim of answering the same six questions. Our research shows that there is large variation in the results (i.e., the answers on the six research questions). The "non-standard errors" are similar in magnitude as the (mean) standard error and even looking only at a sub-sample of “highest quality results” does not change the picture much.

In other words, we find that if you ask different expert researchers to study a question using the same data, you may still get different answers. Furthermore, the researchers themselves underestimate the variation in the answers that different researchers or research teams provide. Read more about this somewhat depressing but nevertheless exciting (at least to me) and definitely relevant research under the following links:

Link to the project website | Link to the working paper

Oh, and if you want a more humorous take on the issue, watch the below interview with Albert Menkveld, one of the lead authors on the paper.