Ingar Haaland, NHH
Misperceived Returns to Active Investing
Abstract
We conduct field experiments with retail investors recruited from a social trading platform. In our main experiment, we first elicit beliefs about the returns to active investing. We then generate exogenous variation in beliefs by providing treated respondents with information about index funds historically outperforming active funds. Treated respondents are 17.8 percentage points more likely to believe that index funds will outperform active funds in the future. Four months after the experiment, we collect administrative data on portfolio allocations. Treated respondents increase the index fund shares of their portfolios by 4.4 percentage points (37.7%) relative to the control group.
Ingar Haaland is Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH). He received His PhD from NHH in 2019 and spent three years at the University of Bergen before returning to NHH in 2022.
He uses experimental methods, such as information provision experiments, to study economic behavior across different domains, including political economy, household finance, and macroeconomics.