We are delighted to announce that the CEPR Network on Financial Economics is launching a virtual seminar series at the start of the academic year.

The CEPR Advanced Forum for Financial Economics (CAFFE) will be organized by Laurent Calvet, Kim Peijnenburg, and Raman Uppal from EDHEC Business School. Its objective is to make cutting-edge finance research available to researchers based in Europe and around the world. There will be one seminar each month covering all topics in Financial Economics. The seminar is open to all participants but special emphasis will be placed on European-based researchers working on novel issues such as the financial implications of Covid-19. We view this seminar series as a joint venture of all researchers in Financial Economics and we very much look forward to your wholehearted and enthusiastic support.

Each seminar will run for 75 minutes, with 40 minutes allocated to the speaker, 20 minutes to a discussant, and 15 minutes for questions from the audience. The seminar starts just after lunch at 2PM CET (1PM London time), so have your caffè during CAFFE!

On Tuesday the 8 December our speaker is Ester Faia (Goethe University Frankfurt and CEPR) who will be presenting the paper: "Confirmation Bias in Information Selection and Processing: Survey Evidence from the Pandemic".

ABSTRACT
How people form beliefs is crucial for understanding decision-making under uncertainty. This is particularly important in a situation such as a pandemic, where beliefs will affect behaviors that impact public health as well as the aggregate economy. We conduct two survey experiments to shed light on potential biases in belief formation, focusing in particular on the tone of information people choose to consume and how they incorporate this information into their beliefs.  In the first experiment,  people express their preferences over pandemic-related articles with optimistic and pessimistic headlines, and are then randomly shown one of the articles. We find that respondents with more pessimistic prior beliefs about the pandemic are substantially more likely to prefer pessimistic articles, which we interpret as evidence of confirmation bias. In line with this, respondents assigned to the less preferred article also rate it as less reliable and informative (relative to those who prefer it); they also discount information from the article when it is less preferred. These motivated beliefs also end up impacting incentivized and actual behavior. In a second experiment, we study how partisan views interact with information selection and processing.  We find strong evidence of source dependence: revealing the news source further distorts information acquisition and processing, and is quantitatively as important as respondents' prior views about the pandemic.

For more information and to register see here.