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Staff Profile

Professor Darren Duxbury

Chair in Finance

  • Email: darren.duxbury@ncl.ac.uk
  • Telephone: +44 (0)191 208 1517
  • Address: Newcastle University Business School
    Frederick Douglass Centre, room 3.47
    Newcastle Helix
    2 Science Square
    Newcastle upon Tyne
    NE4 5TG
Background

Professor Duxbury is an international expert in the areas of experimental and behavioral finance. He publishes in world-leading, internationally excellent, academic journals, including Management Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, British Journal of Management, and Journal of Banking and Finance, along with Journal of Empirical Finance, European Journal of Finance, Journal of International Financial Markets Institutions and Money, International Review of Financial Analysis, Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Economics Letters, Accounting and Business Research and British Accounting Review. His interdisciplinary work is published in international journals across various disciplines, including Risk Analysis, Journal of Economic Psychology, Legal Studies and Sustainability.  He is the author of two invited review papers in the Review of Behavioral Finance, a research monograph on repeated financial decision making and presents regularly at international conferences.

Professor Duxbury's research is recognised internationally (he was awarded a Citation of Excellence by Emerald Management Reviews for one of the top 50 papers worldwide in 2008) and has informed research by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Whitehouse discussions. He is named in the House of Lords inquiry into the use of behaviour change interventions as a means of achieving government policy goals (Behaviour Change, Evidence Session No. 3, 16-11-2010) in the context of behaviour change expertise in the UK.

Professor Duxbury's expertise has been sought by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in relation to personal accounts and auto-enrolment and by the Personal Accounts Delivery Authority (PADA) and the National Employment Savings Trust (NEST) in relation to attitudes to loss in pensions. He provided academic insight to Aviva's "Save Smarter" campaign, see also:

Funded work for the Money Advice Service lead to the publication of a report in September 2017 - Financial Rules of Thumb: A Review of the Evidence and Its Implications - available on the MAS website here. Prior to publication the report informed a March 2017 Financial Advice Working Group report prepared for HM Treasury and the Financial Conduct Authority - Rules of Thumb and Nudges: Improving the financial well-being of UK consumers - available on the FCA website here. For easy insight and an overview of the evidence see the news story here. 

In an academic-industry research collaboration funded by the National Westminster Bank (NatWest), Professor Duxbury is investigating the behavioral drivers of UK individuals' intentions to use cash. The research has far-reaching implications for the cash processing industry in particular, and the banking sector more generally, along with wide-ranging policy implications associated with the world-wide trend towards cashless societies. The behavioral insights support the view that cash plays an important budgetary role for many in society, including, but not limited to, those consumers with low levels of financial literacy. The importance of trait habitual behavior in consumer payment method intention suggests some sections of society will likely resist payment method innovation, though evidence in relation to exogenous shocks supports the view that payment intention habits are susceptible to change. Insights from the research have been disseminated via academic and practitioner conferences, including as invited plenary speaker at the Mint Directors Conference 2022, and industry outlets, including Cash, Payment and CBDC News (see), with a summary available via the Chartered Bankers Knowledge Hub here.

Professor Duxbury is a member of the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Academic Advisory Group established by the Bank of England and HM Treasury to advise on the design phase of the 'digital pound'.

Professor Duxbury is a Co-I in the UKRI GCRF Living Deltas Hub, an international, interdisciplinary research project working with delta-dwellers and policy makers to develop solutions that can help better realise the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in delta-specific contexts. He applies his behavioural expertise to better understand economic behaviour and risk trade-offs in the context of climate and deltas. 

Professor Duxbury is an invited member of the Behavioural Finance Working Group and Associate Editor for the Review of Behavioral Finance. He has a long standing affiliation with the Centre for Decision Research, University of Leeds, where was Visiting Professor (2013-2019). He founded the Behavioural Research in Finance (BRiF) group at Newcastle, now a theme in the wider Accounting & Finance Research Community here, for which he is Research Community Lead.


Bibliographic links

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=3InoDA0AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Darren_Duxbury

ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7285-8474

Scopus Author ID: 55916769900

Research

Research interests:

My research is concerned with the study of financial behaviour, from both an empirical and experimental perspective, encompassing individual, household and corporate behaviours over a broad range of financial decisions, including investing, saving, debt, pensions and corporate investment decisions. I aim to provide a deeper understanding of why individuals make the financial decisions they do.

My research expertise is in the complementary areas of experimental and behavioural finance, to which I apply insights from the decision research and psychology literatures. 

 Areas of application and recent projects include:

  • Behavioral drivers of intentions to use cash.
  • Climate risk-risk trade-offs
  • How reference points impact on individual and corporate decisions.
  • How cultural differences impact on individual and corporate decisions.
  • How emotions impact on economic and financial decisions.
  • How prior outcomes impact on economic and financial decisions, including investor trading behavior, stock selection and portfolio composition, and escalation of commitment (sunk cost effect).
  • Financial asset allocation decisions, including retirement saving and annuity decisions.
  • Mental accounting effects in individual decision-making.
  • Perceptions of financial risk and volatility.
  • Perceptions and expectations of price changes.
  • Experimental financial markets.

 PhD supervision:

If you are interested in research in the areas of experimental and behavioral accounting/ economics/ finance, either in relation to the specific research topics above or more broadly, and you meet the PhD entry criteria of Newcastle University Business School, please email me your CV and research proposal.

 Professional activities:

  • Associate Editor for:  Review of Behavioral Finance
  • Member of Editorial Board for: International Journal of Behavioural Accounting and Finance
  • Member of Organising Committee for: 2017 Behavioural Finance Working Group Conference, Queen Mary University London, England, 12-13 June, 2017
  • Member of Organising Committee for: International Association for Research in Economic Psychology/The Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics – Workshop on Economic Psychology: New Methods and Findings, University of Bolton, England, 25-26 March, 2010
  • Invited member of: Behavioural Finance Working Group
  • Reviewer for: American Economic Review, Econometrica, Review of Economic Studies, Economic Journal, Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Journal of Economic Psychology, Managerial and Decision Economics, Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Decision Analysis, Review of Behavioral Finance, International Journal of Behavioural Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Business Research, British Accounting Review, Journal of Pension Economics and Finance, Journal of Financial Counseling and Planning, Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, and International Journal of Forecasting, among others
  • Project rapporteur and a grant proposal referee for the ESRC
  • Grant proposal reviewer for Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)
  • Research proposal reviewer for Athens University of Economics and Business

Awards and academic recognition:

  • 2008 Journal of Economic Psychology paper awarded a Citation of Excellence award as one of the top 50 papers of 2008 (from 15,000 reviewed) by Emerald Management Reviews
  • 2007 Finance Letters paper listed on SSRN's Top Ten download list 2008-2012
  • 2005 Journal of Economic Psychology paper listed in the Top25 Hottest Articles on ScienceDirect.com for the journal. 

Keywords:

  • Behavioral finance (behavioural finance)
  • Experimental finance
  • Behavioural Research in Finance (BRiF)
  • Investor behavior (investor behaviour)
  • Prior outcomes; sunk costs; escalation of commitment
  • Emotions
  • Reference points
  • Risk-risk trade-off
Teaching

Professor Duxbury has over 30 years teaching experience across the accounting and finance disciplines. He developed and delivers ACC3003 Issues in Behavioural Finance, an exemplar of research-led teaching, in which he brings his research expertise to the fore.

 

 

Publications