Behavioral Researcher - Research Firm

Morningstar, Inc. is a leading provider of independent investment research in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. The company offers an extensive line of products and services for individual investors, financial advisors, asset managers, retirement plan providers and sponsors, and institutional investors in the private capital markets.

The Group : On the Behavioral Insights Team, we conduct original research on financial behavior to help people save and invest their money more effectively. We study what works, and what doesn't, and publicize the results broadly.

The Role :

Morningstar is looking for an applied behavioral researcher, to help individual investors improve their financial future. You'll work with a team of researchers to identify major obstacles that individuals face with investing, design techniques to overcome those obstacles, and run field experiments to with individual investors and their financial advisors.

In this role, you'll work hand in hand with our in-house behavioral science team (in Mumbai and Chicago), and partner with leading academics around the world. The position is based in our Mumbai office.

Responsibilities :

- Conduct new research on individual financial behavior, applying a behavioral lens to financial decisions including retirement planning, investing, risk tolerance, and spending and savings behavior.

- Work with the marketing, product, and research teams to identify and solve pressing questions around financial behavior and to put the answers into practice.

- Partner with the team to design, execute, and analyze large-scale digital experiments to test your ideas; Morningstar interacts with millions of individual investors and their advisors.

- Run statistical analyses to rigorously determine the impact of your interventions, then write up the results for academic audiences and for the public.

- Publicize your results - in the media, in papers, and at conferences.

Requirements :

- Postgraduate training in psychology, behavioral economics, behavioral finance or related fields.

- At least two years of experience using Python, R, STATA or a similar statistical language.

- Demonstrated expertise in statistical methods for social science research, such as regressions, machine learning, ANOVA, survey analysis, experimental design and analysis.

- Experience conducting theory-based, empirical research, especially for financial decisions is ideal.

- Experience in the investing and/or financial planning fields are a plus.

- Experience with the product development is useful.

- Demonstrated ability writing about behavioral research for a general audience.

- Experience and enjoyment with public speaking is great, but not necessarily required.

- Independent, creative thinker with a strong interest in financial behavior.