The award was presented to Assistant Professor Adam Aiken during the Southern Finance Association Annual Meeting.
Adam Aiken, assistant professor of finance in the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business, received the Outstanding Paper in Investments Award at the 2016 annual meeting of the Southern Finance Association.
Aiken coauthored “Do Politicians ‘Put Their Money Where Their Mouth Is?’ Ideology and Portfolio Choice” with Jesse Ellis, N.C. State University, and Minjeong Kang, POSTECH. They presented the paper during the Nov. 16-19 meeting in Sandestin, Florida. The meeting featured more than 200 papers in the following areas: corporate finance, investments, international, institutions and markets, and real estate and risk management.
The paper’s abstract reads: “To investigate how political tastes influence portfolio decisions, we exploit the mandatory disclosure of equity holdings made by U.S. Congress members and a continuous measure of ideology based on their voting records. By doing so, we address methodological issues facing the literature on political tastes and investment decisions. We find that politicians with similar beliefs hold similar equity portfolios and that more liberal members engage in more socially responsible investing, even within each party. Our results are driven by both liberals having a relative taste for firms with high social responsibility scores and by conservatives having a relative taste for firms with low scores. Ideology-based investments do not carry over to less salient mutual fund selections. We attempt to rule out other explanations, such as constituent ideology, window dressing, and home bias. We conclude that politicians’ equity investment decisions are consistent with their political beliefs.”
Aiken also presented the paper during the Financial Management Association Annual Meeting in October, as well as at a seminar held at N.C. State University.
About the Southern Finance Association
The Southern Finance Association aims to foster the development of scientific and literary works in finance; to improve the teaching of finance: to enhance communication among people interested in finance who work in government, business, and academic institutions; and to undertake such other activities as may be appropriate for a non-profit association dedicated to finance scholarship.