With the individual, business and economic benefits on offer from a more ethical Australia, the business case for change is a sound one. Strengthening ethics is simply a must for a better future.

Self-awareness has been hailed as one of the most important meta-skills of the 21st century. In an investment advice context, both advisers and clients benefit from engaging in activities that promote its development.

Activist short sellers have received increasing attention - and notoriety - in recent years. This paper adopts the lens of narrative economics to reveal useful insights into the dynamics of activist short selling.

Many investment professionals are typically quite skilled at manipulation, so those researching their funds need to protect themselves against manipulation as they conduct their due diligence.

Global financial markets have been reacting to the Covid-19 pandemic since early 2020, providing a unique opportunity for researchers to examine the impact of a global pandemic on uncertainty, investor reactions, and stock prices.

Emotions are an important influence on financial decision-making and investing. These three papers explore how emotional regulation strategies influence decision-making under risk and uncertainty, and the link to financial success.

Investors rely on both their competence and confidence to make investment decisions. The overconfidence effect is sometimes dubbed the "mother of all biases".

These two papers provide useful insights into how investors' attitudes and behaviours evolve over time, and how our beliefs are distorted if we experience positive or negative prior returns.

Even armed with objective probabilities to help decision-making, people often add their own subjective "weights". Two papers explain this "probability weighting" and how it affects investment decisions.

Finology - behavioural FINance and investor psychOLOGY - knowledge and skills substantially enhance practitioners' ability to communicate with clients and manage portfolios more effectively. This Backgrounder seeks to foster a greater understanding of and interest in finology.

The first generation of behavioural finance described people as "irrational", fooled into cognitive and emotional errors that diminish wealth. The second generation of behavioural finance describes people as "normal" - we use shortcuts and sometimes commit errors on the way to satisfying our wants.

Classical economists often incorporated human behaviour into their thinking. But in the 1960s and 1970s, homo economicus - the great rational agent of economic theory - was born. It was not until the 1990s that the link between human behaviour and economics began to be re-established.

Finology is the interesting and unique mix of behavioural finance ("fin") and investor psychology ("ology") as it relates to giving investment advice to individual investors.

Behavioural finance supplements traditional financial and investment theory. Findings in the field of behavioural finance may help advisers, consultants and clients better manage their thoughts, feelings, and actions when investing.

Beliefs interact with investors' biases and preferences to ultimately influence their behaviour. Two recent papers highlight the impact of individual investors' beliefs about the future and the impact on portfolio behaviour and composition, as well as market returns.

Relatively little is known about what greed is and does. These two papers highlight the importance of greed in economic behaviour, and to a greater chance of engaging in ethically questionable behaviour.

Culture explains much about how we think, feel, and behave. These two papers explore the influence of culture and cultural distance in a financial context.

Understanding what has really changed in people's values as a result of Covid-19 and the influence of emotions will prepare us for the increasingly polarised economic, geopolitical, social and environmental new world order.

These two papers provide a more sophisticated, behavioural understanding of time discounting, to enable more nuanced conversations with clients about current and future consumption, and help mitigate the potentially negative impacts of present bias.

It turns out that 'retiring’ and withdrawing from productive life actually conflicts with our own natural drivers of well-being. The concept of ‘retirement’ is an obsolescent by-product of the industrial era that needs to be retired.