Professor Chris Brooks and Mr Ivan Sangiorgi’s work on the link between age and the financial risk tolerance of retail investors in the UK has won the Behavioural Finance Working Group (BFWG)'s Best Quantitative Paper Award.

BFWG is an internationally recognised research centre in Behavioural Finance. Every year the group selects the best quantitative paper presented at their annual conference. For 2017, the study “Why are Older Investors Less Willing to Take Financial Risks”, co-authored by Professor Brooks, Mr Sangiorgi, Professor Hillenbrand and Professor Money, all of Henley Business School, was announced as the recipient of the award.

The research shows that older retail investors are less risk tolerant, and even after allowing for a range of other relevant factors such as gender, wealth, marital and employment status, the age effect still remains.

This study constitutes the first output among several projects undertaken under the £0.5m research grant awarded to Chris Brooks and Carola Hillenbrand to examine the decision-making of retail investors.

Mr Sangiorgi commented, “We are very happy to have won the Best Quantitative Paper Award. Only two such prizes are given for the papers presented at the conference, and we are delighted that the Behavioural Finance Working Group has given us this recognition. I hope that the study will help regulators and financial advisors to achieve better market practices when assessing the investment risk attitudes of clients of different ages and to improve the asset allocation of investors.”

Click here to download the working paper version