Freshman class

Investigating the deciders

Jonathan Reuter, assistant professor of finance

PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Representative publication: "Do Ads Influence Editors? Advertising and Bias in the Financial Media" (with Eric Zitzewitz), The Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 2006

I have two broad academic interests: the behavior of financial institutions including mutual funds, investment banks, and the financial media, and the causes and consequences of individual financial decisions. In one study, my research team found that investors follow the financial media's recommendations on mutual funds even though the recommended funds perform below average. (We noticed that some publications in our sample were disproportionately more likely to recommend the mutual funds of their advertisers.) In ongoing research supported by the Social Security Administration, I am looking at factors that influence decisions to retire.