Blog

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

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!

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)