Julie Agnew
Associate Professor of Finance and Economics, John N. Dalton Term Chair at the College of William and Mary’s Mason School of Business, College of William and Mary
Associate Professor of Finance and Economics, John N. Dalton Term Chair at the College of William and Mary’s Mason School of Business, College of William and Mary
Julie Agnew is an Associate Professor of Finance and Economics and holds the John N. Dalton Term Chair at the College of William and Mary’s Mason School of Business. She is a TIAA-CREF Institute Fellow, a former elected member of the Defined Contribution Plans Advisory Committee (DCPAC) for the Virginia Retirement System, and a Research Associate for the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. From 2009-2011, she was the Co-Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Behavioral Finance Research. Her research and consulting activities focus on behavioral finance and its relationship to financial decisions made by individuals in their retirement plans. She has presented her research at several national and international conferences, testified as an invited expert witness in front of the Senate’s Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions and published in journals that include the American Economic Review, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, the Journal of Pension Economics and Finance and the Journal of Behavioral Finance. Additionally, she has won several nationally competitive research grants. Prior to pursuing her doctorate, she worked as an Analyst in investment banking for Salomon Brothers in New York City and as an Equity Research Associate for Vector Securities International in Chicago. A former Fulbright Scholar to Singapore, she co-authored a book examining strategic business opportunities in Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. Dr. Agnew earned a B.A. degree in Economics (High Honors) and a minor in Mathematics from the College of William and Mary. She graduated Magna Cum Laude and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She received a Ph.D. in Finance from Boston College in 2001. In 2012, she was a Senior Visiting Fellow working with Centre for Pensions and Superannuation at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
Using an online incentivized discrete choice experiment, we study how well individuals judge financial advice and whether factors other than advice quality influence their evaluations. We find evidence that some individuals rely on extraneous signals to judge advice quality and observe some persistency in adviser choice over time. Our results also explain how some advisers can maintain trustworthy reputations despite giving bad advice. Finally, we explore whether individuals learn throughout the experiment. Our findings have several public policy implications that are discussed in the conclusion.