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08 Jan 2018

Associate Professor John Beshears's Research on Portfolio Risk-Taking Wins Annual TIAA Paul A. Samuelson Award

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John Beshears

BOSTON—The TIAA Institute today announced that Harvard Business School associate professor John Beshears, with fellow researchers David Laibson and Brigitte Madrian of Harvard University, and James Choi of Yale University, has won the 22nd Annual TIAA Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security. The Samuelson Award recognizes outstanding research that the private and public sectors can use to maintain and enhance Americans’ financial well-being.

The researchers were recognized for their paper, “Does Aggregated Returns Disclosure Increase Portfolio Risk-Taking?” The paper examines previous studies’ findings that participants take more investment risks if they see returns less frequently, see portfolio-level returns, or see long-horizon historical distributions. The authors offer a different perspective that challenges what has been widely accepted about how investor behaviors and disclosure policies impact risk-taking.

“We're honored to receive the Samuelson Award for our work on the design of investment returns disclosure,” said the authors in a joint statement. “The TIAA Institute has a long history of supporting impactful research that promotes financial security. We hope that our article continues this tradition by shedding light on the elements of the information environment that do and do not influence individuals' portfolio choices.”

“Previous academic experiments have shown that participants are willing to take more investment risk when they see portfolio-level versus individual-asset returns, or when they view the distribution of returns over longer periods. These earlier experiments suggest that information aggregation increases risk taking, which has enormous implications for financial advisory practice and disclosure policies,” said Conrad S. Ciccotello of the University of Denver, one of this year’s judges. “This paper shows that the previously-accepted link between information aggregation and risk taking does not hold in a more realistic experimental setting. In so doing, it offers a new and more robust perspective on how investor behaviors and disclosure policies impact risk taking, which in turn can positively impact the lifelong financial security of individual investors and their families.”
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Christian Camerota
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ccamerota+hbs.edu

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