dissertation report on behavioral finance

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

STUDY ON BEHAVIORAL FINANCE, BEHAVIORAL BIASES, AND INVESTMENT DECISIONS

Behavioral finance is an open-minded finance which includes the study of psychology, sociology, and finance. Behavioral finance micro examines behavior or biases of investors and behavioral finance macro describe anomalies in the efficient market. Nowadays, behavioral finance is not a new concept, the existence, and impact of behavioral biases in investor's behavior and human judgment are huge. In this paper, we will review various studies in this area so as to have a clear understanding of the behavioral finance and its significance in the financial decision making of investors. JEL CLASSIFICATION: G11, G14

Related Papers

José G. Vargas-Hernández

This paper focuses on the study of one of the most recent and successful technology-based startups, whose nature is the hospitality industry. Airbnb is part of the model peer to peer of the collaborative economy, which means it is participating in a Community market based on trust the host-guest experience for traveling richer than it would simply stay in a hotel. For the development of this work the research methods will be descriptive and analytical due to the interest of not only explain the origin and strategies that practices the company but also doing an analysis of the tendency of users, both the hosts and guests about their perception of the services offered and whether it will become the preferred way to rent a space. The trends show that the explosive growth since its inception continues to be a trend, as long as the regulations imposed by different governments are met and that trust between users stays strong.

Fitry Andry

Raja Asad Azad

Traditional finance theory is based on the principle of maximization of utility and explains how choices are made by rational people. Although the theory provides numerous insights, observation of actual behavior of people was seen to be different from what the theory predicted. The homo economicus is in reality a homo sapien who has emotions and beliefs that help to filter the content from his or her environment. These beliefs and preferences that arise due to cogni-tive limitations, presence of emotions, and various psychological motives guide or bias his or her decisions. Much literature states that the biases should be corrected as they negatively impact financial behaviour and individual's well‐being. However, evolutionary psychology considers biases as design features of human mind. Thus, biases are not always bad, as at times, these biases can help the individual investor to choose the best course of action from the multiple possibilities and enable committing the less costly mistakes, thereby helping the individual to achieve satisficing behaviour. This paper aims to explore the investor biases and see whether they are related to the financial satisfaction of the individuals. Financial satisfaction is the measure of satisfaction with one's financial situation. The results showed that overconfidence bias, reliance on expert bias, and self‐control bias have a positive and significant association with financial satisfaction levels. Association of a few other biases with financial satisfaction was also observed under certain control conditions. This study provides further insights on investor behavior and paves the way for various possibilities for future research.

IJAR Indexing

Research has proved that investors in the equity market are not consistently rational. Emotions influence their decision making process in the complex environment of equity market, in the form of behavioral biases. This paper reviews five important behavioral biases exhibited by investors in the equity market. The behavioral biases reviewed include, representativeness, anchoring, gambler?s fallacy, availability and optimism. The literature available for each of the biases is reviewed and hence this paper draws attention to a new dimension in finance.

AARF Publications Journals

Asian Journal of Economics, Business and Accounting

This study investigates the existence of heuristics biases in Colombo Stock Exchange and their effect on investment performance from individual investor's point of view. In specific, the effects of anchoring, availability bias, gamblers fallacy, overconfidence and representativeness are investigated. Further, the study inspects whether the heuristics biases differ between younger and older investors. The primary data were collected by survey from 425 individual investors. The data were analyzed using multivariate analysis such as Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Structure Equation Modeling (SEM). The results show that there is a statistically significant effect of anchoring, availability bias, overconfidence and representativeness bias on investment performance. However, gamblers fallacy not significantly affects investment performance. Furthermore, statistically significant differences are found between the answers of younger and older investors. This study, hopefully, will help investors to be aware of the impact of their own heuristics bias on their decision making in the stock market, thus increasing the rationality of investment decisions for enhanced market efficiency.

IJREAM EDITOR

Finance is the system that includes the granting of money and credit, making of investments and provision of banking facilities. Behavioral finance is a new academic discipline which seeks to apply the insights of the psychologists to understand the behavior of both investors and financial markets. This study analyse the Investors behavior through 600 respondents using Factor analysis test. The results of the study show that the 16 variables selected for the study had been reduced to 5 factor models using the principle component analysis such as Market Dynamics, Logical Analysis , Herding Bias, Regret Aversion and Heuristic Bias. Thus, Behavioral finance is becoming a primary part of the decision making process, since it influences investors' behavior greatly.

Nada Ibrahim

This study investigates the existence of behavioral biases in Amman Stock Exchange and their effect on investment performance from investor's point of view. In specific, the effects of overconfidence bias, familiarity bias, loss aversion bias, disposition bias, availability bias, representativeness bias, confirmation bias and herding bias are investigated. Moreover, the study inspects whether the behavioral biases differ between males and females. The results show that there is a statistically significant effect of overconfidence bias, familiarity bias, availability bias, representativeness bias and herding bias on investment performance (p≤5%). Moreover, disposition bias, confirmation bias and loss aversion bias significantly affect investment performance but at a critical level of (p≤10%). No statistically significant differences are found between the answers of males and females.

Rohit Kumar

Finance has been studied around the globe from ages but the dimensions of behavioral science have been related with finance only a few decades before. This led to evolution of behavioral finance, where effect of human emotions, cognitive errors and psychology on investment decision is studied. The main objective of this study was to explore the individual investors’ investment preference i.e., utilitarian or value-expressive. Moreover, the extent to which their investment decision is dominated by their investment preference has been studied. The relationship between demographic factors and investment preference of an individual has also been examined. The results show that the individual investors at Indian stock exchange, in general, are more value-expressive than utilitarian. Their investment decisions are affected by many behavioral biases as well as with certain demographic factors.

Metamorphosis- A Journal of Management Research

Ansted I Joseph , Anu Antony

Investors exhibit irrational behaviour in their decision-making. The decision-making process itself is considered to be a cognitive process as the investors have to make a decision based on various alternatives available to them. The researchers have found that the investors’ decision-making was adversely affected by the various psychological/behavioural factors. The current study was carried forward to identify the effect of the behavioural factors affecting the investment decision of the investors. Five behavioural factors, namely overconfidence bias, representative bias, regret aversion, mental accounting, and herd behaviour, were considered to study the behavioural biases of the investors. The study sample was taken from investors of Kerala, and the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) method was used to analyse the intensity of behavioural factors affecting the investment decision. Based on the priority vector, it was found that the investors of Kerala were highly influenced with overconfidence bias and regret aversion. Herd behaviour had less effect on their decision-making.

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

RELATED PAPERS

Indus Foundation International Journals UGC Approved

AARF Publications Journals , Dr. P.S.Ravindra

Muhammad Mubin , Sumra Mughal

Abey Francis

Imran Umer Chhapra

Mustafa Okur

Magdalena Mikołajek-Gocejna

DeBondt, W.F.M. and Thaler, R.H. (1995), “Financial decision making in markets and firms: a behavioral perspective”,Handbooks inOperations Research and Management Science, Vol. 9 No. 13, pp. 385-410.

Asif Ali 8221-FMS/MBA/F19

Advances in Cognitive Systems

Jaap Spronk

Sana Jameel

Jacob Niyoyita Mahina

Salman Shahid

Zulqarnain Asab

Journal of Behavioral Decision Making

John Nofsinger

Ashesh Kaushik

AMARI Mouna

Suzane Strehlau

Sebastian Arumi

rayhan kabir

Victoria Bogdan

Decision Support Systems

Richard Deaves

HANDBOOK OF FINANCE: VOLUME 2: INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT AND FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT, Frank J. Fabozzi, ed., John Wiley & Sons, pp. 85-111, 2008.

Victor Ricciardi

IAEME Publication

Duncan Elly

IOSR Journals

INFORMATION …

SHILI BABAEI

Marwa Zouaoui

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

• Behavioural Economics
• Behavioral Finance

UNDERSTANDING BEHAVIORAL FINANCE

• February 2019
• Conference: 5th Management Doctoral Colloquium

• National Institute of Technology, Silchar

Discover the world's research

• 25+ million members
• 160+ million publication pages
• 2.3+ billion citations

• Recruit researchers
• Join for free
• Login Email Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google Welcome back! Please log in. Email · Hint Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google No account? Sign up

• Help & FAQ

Essays on behavioral finance and corporate finance

• Research Group: Finance
• Center Ph. D. Students

Research output : Thesis › Doctoral Thesis

Access to Document

• 10.26116/dd2e-g320
• TiU_220207_CeNTER_proefschrift Lingbo Shen_digitaal Final published version, 1.32 MB

Fingerprint

• Corporate Finance Keyphrases 100%
• Executive Keyphrases 100%
• Behavioral Finance Keyphrases 100%
• Behavioural Finance Economics, Econometrics and Finance 100%
• Performance Difference Keyphrases 33%
• Conference Calls Keyphrases 33%
• Crisis Time Keyphrases 33%
• COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis Keyphrases 33%

T1 - Essays on behavioral finance and corporate finance

AU - Shen, Lingbo

N2 - This Ph.D. dissertation consists of three independent chapters in behavioral finance and corporate finance. The first chapter examines whether and how ethnicity similarity between analysts and executives affect their interactions in conference calls. The second chapter investigates firms' demand for inventor executives, executives with innovation experience, around firms' IPOs. The last chapter studies teams and individual analysts performance differences during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis time.

AB - This Ph.D. dissertation consists of three independent chapters in behavioral finance and corporate finance. The first chapter examines whether and how ethnicity similarity between analysts and executives affect their interactions in conference calls. The second chapter investigates firms' demand for inventor executives, executives with innovation experience, around firms' IPOs. The last chapter studies teams and individual analysts performance differences during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis time.

U2 - 10.26116/dd2e-g320

DO - 10.26116/dd2e-g320

M3 - Doctoral Thesis

SN - 978 90 5668 683 3

T3 - CentER Dissertation Series

PB - CentER, Center for Economic Research

CY - Tilburg

• My Shodhganga
• Receive email updates
• Edit Profile

Shodhganga : a reservoir of Indian theses @ INFLIBNET

• Shodhganga@INFLIBNET
• Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswathi Viswa Mahavidyalaya
• Department of Management Studies

Items in Shodhganga are licensed under Creative Commons Licence Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

• Trading Skills
• Trading Psychology

Behavioral Finance: Biases, Emotions and Financial Behavior

• Search Search Please fill out this field.

What Is Behavioral Finance?

Understanding behavioral finance, behavioral finance concepts.

• Biases Studied
• The Stock Market
• Behavioral Finance FAQs

The Bottom Line

Adam Hayes, Ph.D., CFA, is a financial writer with 15+ years Wall Street experience as a derivatives trader. Besides his extensive derivative trading expertise, Adam is an expert in economics and behavioral finance. Adam received his master's in economics from The New School for Social Research and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in sociology. He is a CFA charterholder as well as holding FINRA Series 7, 55 & 63 licenses. He currently researches and teaches economic sociology and the social studies of finance at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Yarilet Perez is an experienced multimedia journalist and fact-checker with a Master of Science in Journalism. She has worked in multiple cities covering breaking news, politics, education, and more. Her expertise is in personal finance and investing, and real estate.

• Behavioral Finance: Biases, Emotions and Financial Behavior CURRENT ARTICLE
• Introduction to Behavioral Finance
• Understanding Investor Behavior
• Market Psychology
• Power of the Masses Drives the Market
• Read the Market's Psychological State
• Herd Instinct
• When Fear and Greed Take Over
• Behavioral Biases and How to Avoid Them
• How to Avoid Emotional Investing
• Psychological Traps Investors Should Avoid
• Psychological Quirks That Affect Your Trading
• Removing the Barriers to Successful Investing
• Break Bad Trading Habits and Follow Your Rules
• Random Reinforcement: Why Most Traders Fail
• How to Develop a Trading Brain
• Let Your Profits Run
• The Art of Cutting Your Losses
• Positive Feedback
• Loss Psychology
• Psychological Coping Strategies for Handling Losses
• Regret Avoidance
• Technical Analysis That Indicates Market Psychology
• Psychology of Support and Resistance Zones
• Investing vs. Gambling
• The Downward Spiral of Trading Addiction
• The Casino Mentality In Trading

Behavioral finance, a subfield of behavioral economics , proposes that psychological influences and biases affect the financial behaviors of investors and financial practitioners. Moreover, influences and biases can be the source for the explanation of all types of market anomalies and specifically market anomalies in the stock market, such as severe rises or falls in stock price. As behavioral finance is such an integral part of investing, the Securities and Exchange Commission has staff specifically focused on behavioral finance.

Key Takeaways

• Behavioral finance is an area of study focused on how psychological influences can affect market outcomes.
• Behavioral finance can be analyzed to understand different outcomes across a variety of sectors and industries.
• One of the key aspects of behavioral finance studies is the influence of psychological biases.
• Some common behavioral financial aspects include loss aversion, consensus bias, and familiarity tendencies.
• The efficient market theory which states all equities are priced fairly based on all available public information is often debunked for not incorporating irrational emotional behavior.

Behavioral finance can be analyzed from a variety of perspectives. Stock market returns are one area of finance where psychological behaviors are often assumed to influence market outcomes and returns but there are also many different angles for observation. The purpose of the classification of behavioral finance is to help understand why people make certain financial choices and how those choices can affect markets.

Within behavioral finance, it is assumed that financial participants are not perfectly rational and self-controlled but rather psychologically influential with somewhat normal and self-controlling tendencies. Financial decision-making often relies on the investor's mental and physical health. As an investor's overall health improves or worsens, their mental state often changes. This impacts their decision-making and rationality towards all real-world problems, including those specific to finance.

One of the key aspects of behavioral finance studies is the influence of biases. Biases can occur for a variety of reasons. Biases can usually be classified into one of five key concepts. Understanding and classifying different types of behavioral finance biases can be very important when narrowing in on the study or analysis of industry or sector outcomes and results.

Read about Investopedia's 10 Rules of Investing by picking up a copy of our special issue print edition.

Behavioral finance typically encompasses five main concepts:

• Mental accounting : Mental accounting refers to the propensity for people to allocate money for specific purposes.
• Herd behavior : Herd behavior states that people tend to mimic the financial behaviors of the majority of the herd. Herding is notorious in the  stock market  as the cause behind dramatic rallies and sell-offs.
• Emotional gap : The emotional gap refers to decision-making based on extreme emotions or emotional strains such as anxiety, anger, fear, or excitement. Oftentimes, emotions are a key reason why people do not make rational choices.
• Anchoring : Anchoring refers to attaching a spending level to a certain reference. Examples may include spending consistently based on a budget level or rationalizing spending based on different satisfaction utilities. 
• Self-attribution : Self-attribution refers to a tendency to make choices based on overconfidence in one's own knowledge or skill. Self-attribution usually stems from an intrinsic knack in a particular area. Within this category, individuals tend to rank their knowledge higher than others, even when it objectively falls short.

Behavioral finance is exploited through credit card rewards, as consumers are more likely to be willing to spend points, rewards, or miles as opposed to paying for transactions with direct cash.

Some Biases Revealed by Behavioral Finance

Breaking down biases further, many individual biases and tendencies have been identified for behavioral finance analysis. Some of these include:

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias  is when investors have a bias toward accepting information that confirms their already-held belief in an investment. If information surfaces, investors accept it readily to confirm that they're correct about their investment decision—even if the information is flawed.

Experiential Bias

An experiential bias occurs when investors' memory of recent events makes them biased or leads them to believe that the event is far more likely to occur again. For this reason, it is also known as recency bias or availability bias.

For example, the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009 led many investors to exit the stock market. Many had a dismal view of the markets and likely expected more economic hardship in the coming years. The experience of having gone through such a negative event increased their bias or likelihood that the event could reoccur. In reality, the economy recovered, and the market bounced back in the years to follow.

Loss Aversion

Loss aversion occurs when investors place a greater weighting on the concern for losses than the pleasure from market gains. In other words, they're far more likely to try to assign a higher priority to avoiding losses than making investment gains.

As a result, some investors might want a higher payout to compensate for losses. If the high payout isn't likely, they might try to avoid losses altogether even if the investment's risk is acceptable from a rational standpoint.

Applying loss aversion to investing, the so-called disposition effect occurs when investors sell their winners and hang onto their losers. Investors' thinking is that they want to realize gains quickly. However, when an investment is losing money, they'll hold onto it because they want to get back to even or their initial price. Investors tend to admit they are correct about an investment quickly (when there's a gain).

However, investors are reluctant to admit when they made an investment mistake (when there's a loss). The flaw in disposition bias is that the performance of the investment is often tied to the entry price for the investor. In other words, investors gauge the performance of their investment based on their individual entry price disregarding fundamentals or attributes of the investment that may have changed.

Familiarity Bias

The familiarity bias is when investors tend to invest in what they know , such as domestic companies or locally owned investments. As a result, investors are not diversified across multiple sectors and types of investments, which can reduce risk. Investors tend to go with investments that they have a history or have familiarity with.

Familiarity bias can occur in so many ways. You may resist investing in a specific company because of what industry it is in, where it operates, what products it sells, who oversees the management of the company, who its clientele base is, how it performs its marketing, and how complex its accounting is.

Behavioral Finance in the Stock Market

The  efficient market hypothesis (EMH) says that at any given time in a highly  liquid market , stock prices are efficiently valued to reflect all the available information. However, many studies have documented long-term historical phenomena in securities markets that contradict the efficient market hypothesis and cannot be captured plausibly in models based on perfect investor rationality.

The EMH is generally based on the belief that market participants view stock prices rationally based on all current and future intrinsic and external factors. When studying the stock market, behavioral finance takes the view that markets are not fully efficient. This allows for the observation of how psychological and social factors can influence the buying and selling of stocks.

The understanding and usage of behavioral finance biases can be applied to stock and other trading market movements on a daily basis. Broadly, behavioral finance theories have also been used to provide clearer explanations of substantial market anomalies like bubbles and deep recessions. While not a part of EMH, investors and portfolio managers have a vested interest in understanding behavioral finance trends. These trends can be used to help analyze market price levels and fluctuations for speculation as well as decision-making purposes. 

What Does Behavioral Finance Tell Us?

Behavioral finance helps us understand how financial decisions around things like investments, payments, risk, and personal debt, are greatly influenced by human emotion, biases, and cognitive limitations of the mind in processing and responding to information.

How Does Behavioral Finance Differ From Mainstream Financial Theory?

Mainstream theory, on the other hand, makes the assumptions in its models that people are rational actors, that they are free from emotion or the effects of culture and social relations, and that people are self-interested utility maximizers. It also assumes, by extension, that markets are efficient and firms are rational profit-maximizing organizations. Behavioral finance counters each of these assumptions.

How Does Knowing About Behavioral Finance Help?

By understanding how and when people deviate from rational expectations, behavioral finance provides a blueprint to help us make better, more rational decisions when it comes to financial matters.

What Is an Example of a Finding in Behavioral Finance?

Investors are found to systematically hold on to losing investments far too long than rational expectations would predict, and they also sell winners too early. This is known as the disposition effect, and is an extension of the concept of loss aversion to the domain of investing. Rather than locking in a paper loss, investors holding lose positions may even double down and take on greater risk in hopes of breaking even.

Behavioral finance is an area of economics that fuses with psychology. It ascribes the often irrational behavior of individuals when faced with financial choices to a variety of biases and heuristics. Often, individuals are unaware of the underlying biases at work that can underlie bad decision-making. A study of this area of finance is essential to anyone who wants to master the art of trading and investing.

• Terms of Service
• Editorial Policy
• Privacy Policy

• Work & Careers
• Life & Arts

Inside Republicans’ anxiety over Trump

• Inside Republicans’ anxiety over Trump on x (opens in a new window)
• Inside Republicans’ anxiety over Trump on facebook (opens in a new window)
• Inside Republicans’ anxiety over Trump on linkedin (opens in a new window)
• Inside Republicans’ anxiety over Trump on whatsapp (opens in a new window)

Steff Chávez in Washington

This is an on-site version of the US Election Countdown newsletter. You can read the previous edition  here . Sign up for free here to get it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Email us at  [email protected]

Good morning and welcome to US Election Countdown. Today let’s discuss:

Republicans’ frustration with the Trump campaign

Conservative superstar lawyer Eugene Scalia

Petrol prices and energy sector angst

Some Republicans, including strategists and donors, are growing irritated with how Donald Trump is approaching his campaign to win back the White House [free to read].

They’re not panicking about Trump’s election prospects — Republican strategist John Feehery told me Kamala Harris would have to be up 7 percentage points in national polls for real fright to set in — but they’re anxious about his inability to find effective attack lines. They’re also unamused by what they see as overly fawning media coverage of Harris’s campaign.

As Republican strategist Kevin Madden told me:

The dominant mood among Republicans, based on the last month, has been one of frustration . . . her campaign has been allowed to coast for a month and get a free pass. The best time to define her was right out of the gate. Trump has signalled he’s going to get back on offence and try to do more to define Harris, so we’ll see if Republicans start to execute a more co-ordinated campaign and get some momentum back.

Feehery added that Republicans are “nervous” as they face the reality that it will be a “very tough” and “very close” race while their candidate struggles to stay disciplined on messaging.

The election is no longer the slam dunk Trump and his party were anticipating when they were running against Joe Biden. Harris is up 3.7 percentage points nationally , according to the FT’s polling average. Trump, however, had a 3.2 percentage point lead over Biden before he dropped out, according to FiveThirtyEight.

“If [Trump] continues down this path, he’ll lose,” said Eric Levine, a New York bankruptcy lawyer and a prominent donor to Senate Republicans. “The only way you’re going to get those voters who are going to Harris . . . is to change strategy”.

But some party donors and operatives close to Trump are still upbeat. They’re betting that the race will shift back the former president’s way as Harris faces scrutiny on policy issues such as the economy and immigration — especially as the September 10 debate nears.

“We really haven’t had a conversation about the direction of the country. We’ve had a conversation about the reset of the Democratic party. And Harris’s support is nowhere near the level of Biden support in 2020,” said former Trump-aide-turned-lobbyist Bryan Lanza.

Campaign clips: the latest election headlines

Harris, alongside running mate Tim Walz, will sit for her first interview since becoming the Democratic candidate. It airs at 9pm Eastern time. (CNN) 

China is struggling to get meetings with members of Trump’s camp. [Free to read] 

Harris will end a two-day campaign swing through Georgia today as she tries to keep the battleground state in play . (The Washington Post)

US prosecutors have filed a revised criminal indictment against Trump in the federal 2020 election interference case. 

Trump has appointed fringe ex-Democrats Robert F Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard as honorary co-chairs of his presidential transition team.

Behind the scenes

Conservative law has an anti-regulatory superstar with a familiar name: Scalia .

Eugene Scalia, son of former US Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, has been on a successful crusade to foil the Biden administration’s efforts to rein in big business.

In recent months, his legal arguments have dented climate disclosure rules, regulations for private funds and the Federal Trade Commission’s ban on non-compete agreements, which can make it tricky for people to switch jobs.

Scalia told the FT’s Stefania Palma and Brooke Masters:

I love the principles and ideas that [this] country was founded on, and those include a government that is respectful of liberty. When government intrudes on rights, treats people unfairly and claims power the people never gave it, I find it rewarding to call that out. Challenging that sort of government behaviour is a way of furthering American values.

Trump said he wants to resume the light-touch regulation that featured in his first term in the White House. On the Democratic side, it’s anyone’s guess whether Harris will follow in Biden’s footsteps with aggressive policies on financial regulation and competition.

But as Brooke argues , Harris would be “squeezed by aggressive industry litigation and hostile judges”. Scalia would certainly fan those flames.

Petrol prices — a critical political issue for incumbent candidates — are going Harris’s way.

With less than 10 weeks to go until election day, drivers are paying about $3.35 per gallon at the pump, according to the American Automobile Association.

That’s still higher than when Biden took office and the average during Trump’s presidency, but, as the FT’s Myles McCormick has pointed out, prices are at their lowest level since March and they look like they’ll keep going down. (FT Premium subscribers can click here to sign up for our Energy Source newsletter .)

The sector itself, however, is likely getting antsy about Harris’s plans.

US oil and gas companies will want Harris to put forth her energy and climate policies amid worries that she’ll further restrict fossil fuel development.

Why has she stayed quiet on energy and climate so far?

“It looks like the Harris campaign has concluded that it’s safer to avoid antagonising producers or climate activists by skirting these issues entirely,” Kevin Book, managing director of Clearview Energy Partners, told the FT’s Jamie Smyth.

While Harris needs the support of young voters in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, she doesn’t want to risk alienating its oil and gas producers, which have a powerful lobby.

Ahead of Harris’s first interview, Ed Luce takes a look at why she has been reluctant to speak to the press — and why that is a disservice to voters.

Elaine Godfrey joined a “Swifties for Kamala” call as Democrats try to harness Taylor Swift’s devoted fan base and put it to political use. (The Atlantic)

Jon Allsop explores the definition of “ election interference ”, which seems to be everywhere these days. (The New Yorker) 

One thing Janan Ganesh thinks Biden got right: managing the decline of the US’s power .

Join us on September 7 in London and online for the annual FT Weekend Festival. And don’t miss US national editor and columnist Edward Luce and chief foreign affairs commentator Gideon Rachman’s session: America and the world. As a US Election Countdown reader you can take advantage of our special promo code Newsletters24. Register here.

Recommended newsletters for you

FT Exclusive — Be the first to see exclusive FT scoops, features, analysis and investigations. Sign up here

Breaking News — Be alerted to the latest stories as soon as they’re published. Sign up here

Promoted Content

Follow the topics in this article.

• Oil Add to myFT
• Energy sector Add to myFT
• US presidential election 2024 Add to myFT
• Donald Trump Add to myFT
• US Election Countdown Add to myFT