TY - JOUR AU - Beshears,John AU - Choi,James J. AU - Laibson,David AU - Madrian,Brigitte C. TI - Does Aggregated Returns Disclosure Increase Portfolio Risk-Taking? JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 16868 PY - 2011 Y2 - March 2011 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16868 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w16868.pdf N1 - Author contact info: John Beshears Stanford Graduate School of Business 655 Knight Way Stanford, CA 94305-7298 Tel: 650/723-6792 E-Mail: beshears@stanford.edu James J. Choi Yale School of Management 135 Prospect Street P.O. Box 208200 New Haven, CT 06520-8200 E-Mail: james.choi@yale.edu David Laibson Department of Economics Littauer M-12 Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617/496-3402 Fax: 617/495-8570 E-Mail: dlaibson@gmail.com Brigitte C. Madrian John F. Kennedy School of Government Harvard University 79 JFK Street Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617-495-8917 Fax: 617-496-5960 E-Mail: Brigitte_Madrian@Harvard.edu AB - Many previous experiments have found that, consistent with myopic loss aversion, subjects invest more in risky assets if they are given less frequent feedback about their returns, are shown their aggregated portfolio-level (rather than separate asset-by-asset) returns, or are shown long-horizon (rather than one-year) historical asset class return distributions. We study the implications of these results for the effect of financial institutions’ returns disclosure policy on risk-taking. We find that aggregated returns disclosure treatments do not increase portfolio allocations to equity in an experiment where—in contrast to previous experiments—subjects invest in real mutual funds over the course of one year. ER -