SAFE researcher Annika Weber and Christine Laudenbach from the House of Finance at Goethe University as well as Johannes Wohlfart from the University of Copenhagen have won the Vernon L. Smith Young Talent Award in Experimental Finance this year. The three researchers were honored for their work "Beliefs About the Stock Market and Investment Choices: Evidence from a Field Experiment". The paper deals with the results of a field experiment that provides information on how private investors form expectations about future stock market returns based on past stock market developments and how these expectations influence their investment decisions.
The research prize, named after Vernon Lomax Smith, the 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics, is awarded annually by the Austrian Society for Experimental Finance (SEF) together with the US Champman University and is endowed with 4,000 US Dollars. The award recognizes outstanding work in the field of experimental capital market research. However, due to the ongoing corona pandemic, the prize winners will not be able to receive their award until 2021.
Important contribution to financial research
Annika Weber is a research assistant and doctoral candidate at the SAFE research department Household Finance. Christine Laudenbach is a post-doctoral fellow at the chair of Andreas Hackethal at Goethe University, where she is doing research on behavioral economics. Johannes Wohlfart is assistant professor at the Economics Department and the Center for Economic Behavior and Inequality at the University of Copenhagen where he focuses on questions of household finance and wealth inequality.
The jury of the Vernon L. Smith Young Talent Award in Experimental Finance justified its decision by referring to the depth and spectrum of the award-winning research paper. The paper was said to make an important contribution to financial research. This year's decision committee included Elena Asparouhova (University of Utah), Michael Kirchler (University of Innsbruck), Dave Porter (Chapman University) and Utz Weitzel (VU Amsterdam and Radboud University).
