Finance Research Graz (FiRe)

FiRe Graz is the finance research platform of the University of Graz. Founded and operated by the Institute of Banking and Finance, the platform is open to all finance researchers with a connection to the University of Graz and also reaches out across organisational boundaries. Its main areas of interest are empirical and experimental research in finance. (more...)

Upcoming events:
FiRe research seminar (April 22, 2024, 16:00-17:30)
FiRe research seminar (May 16, 2024, 11:00-12:30)
 
FiRe lecture (June 5, 2024, 17:30) 

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News

Paper on sustainable investments

11.03.2024

Together with researchers from Vienna, Stavanger and Brussels, Stefan Palan 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. They study the role that providing information about financial returns and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) impacts plays in influencing investors' decisions towards sustainable investments.

The paper 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)

FiRe Annual Report 2023 released

01.03.2024

The most recent annual report of Finance Research Graz has been released!

Link to the annual report

Berivan Gürel wins Reinhard Selten-Stipendium

15.12.2023

FiRe is pleased to announce that platform researcher Berivan Gürel won the Reinhard Selten-Stipendium of the Gesellschaft für experimentelle Wirtschaftsforschung e.V. (GfeW) for her research proposal "Risk, Risk Tolerance, and Risk Perception: Experiments studying the role of sex and gender". We are confident that the research project funded by this award will make an important contribution to the rapidly growing literature studying gender differences in financial behavior.

Portrait picture of Berivan Gürel

Michael Eggerer joins research platform

12.12.2023

Michael Eggerer recently joined the research platform after accepting a position as a project assistant at the Institute of Banking and Finance. Michael is currently completing his master’s degree in business administration at the University of Graz and is about to start his doctoral studies under the supervision of Prof. Andrea Schertler. Together with his supervisor, he will work on a project on infractions of anti-money laundering rules in banks.

Portrait photo of Michael Eggerer

Erik Theissen wins 'Best Paper Award' at DGF 2023

02.10.2023

For his paper "Payment for Order Flow and Market Quality: A Field Experiment" ,  Erik Theissen received the "Best Paper Award" at the 29th Annual Meeting of the German Finance Association (DGF) at the at the University of Hohenheim. During the three-day conference starting on September 28, 2023, participants got a glimpse of the latest research in various areas of finance, with more than 90 papers being presented. We congratulate Erik for presenting the best paper!

Portrait photo of Erik Theissen, a short-haired man with glasses.

A 'risky' investment in the pension is the best strategy

28.06.2023

As part of the FiRe Lecture series, Prof. Dr. Martin Weber was a guest at the University of Graz on May 27, 2023. In his lecture, he emphasized the importance of private financial retirement planning and the issues to be considered in this context. In addition to the aspect of the "correct" savings strategy in retirement, personal responsibility and the advantage of starting to save early were also addressed.

A particularly interesting conclusion that Prof. Weber presented to the nearly 80 people in the audience was the fact that a diversified investment in the capital market is in most cases better than simply relying on a savings book or savings account, not only in the savings phase but also during retirement. Thus, by consciously taking a certain risk, in most cases a higher standard of living can be achieved even beyond the savings phase.

The Institute of Banking and Finance would like to thank Prof. Weber for the exciting lecture, Raiffeisen-Landesbank Steiermark AG for the catering, the SoWi-Absolvent:innenverein and the Finance Club Graz for supporting the event.

A person in a lecture hall gives a presentation to a group of people
Photo: © Paulus Mayr

Talking about sustainability at financial planner congress

08.05.2023

Stefan Palan recently gave a talk at the Financial Planner Forum 2023, held at Merriott Hotel, Vienna, and organized by Prof. Otto Lucius. Speaking in front of around 300 financial professionals, he presented his 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

Stefan Palan, clad in a dark suit, standing on a stage in front of a rollup reading "Finanz Planer Forum" while giving a talk.
Photo: Fotostudio Huger

Earnings autocorrelation promotes post-earnings-announcement drift

26.04.2023

A paper recently accepted in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis studies the post-earnings-announcement drift. Platform members Josef Fink, Stefan Palan and Erik Theissen are the first to use experiments to study this well-documented market anomaly. Specifically, they 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 the research team's second and main result, they 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, the authors show that - at least in their lab setting - the observed drift can be exploited to earn excess profits.

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

Cover image of the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.

"Non-standard errors" forthcoming in Journal of Finance

14.02.2023

Stefan Palan, Andrea Schertler and Erik Theissen, together with another 340 authors around the globe, recently participated in a large (obviously), cooperative, international research project to study "non-standard errors". As members of one of more than 160 one- or two-researcher teams, they analyzed the same dataset of financial market transactions with the aim of answering the same six questions. Their 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, they 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 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.

Cover image of the Journal of Finance.

Christof Haar joins research platform

09.01.2023

Christof Haar is university assistant and PhD student at the Institute of Finance and student of Computational Social Systems. For his doctoral thesis, he will deal with the long-term impact of ECB's unconventional monetary policy, the COVID-19 crisis financial supports by governments and external factors, like increasing energy prices, on the relatively high inflation rates in the Euro area.

The focus of Christof's dissertation is on the extent to which each of these factors, and potentially others, are contributing to price increases within the euro area, and what the long-term effects of the measures implemented may be on inflation.

Portrait photo of Christof Haar

More news

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