At noon on December 16, the tenth issue of "Noon Sunshine-Young Scholars Forum" was held in Room 116 of the School of Finance. The theme of this forum is "Peer Effects in Pension Expectations". This forum was lectured by Lyu Youji, a newly recruited lecturer at the school and a Ph.D. in Applied Economics from Peking University. His research interests are in social insurance and behavioral economics. His works have been published in Journal of Pension Economics & Finance, Journal of Financial Research, Finance and Trade Research, and Insurance Studies. Party Secretary Han Xu and Vice President Liu Lanbiao attended the event.

The forum invited Liu Chenyuan, the assistant professor at the School of Economics and Management of Tsinghua University, to make a comment. Her research interests are in health economics and insurance economics. Her works have been accepted by several international journals, such as American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and Journal of Health Economics.

Lyu Youji introduced his work from several aspects, including the research background, empirical methods, and main findings. Accurate pension expectations are a sufficient condition for individuals to make rational decisions, but this sufficient condition is difficult to meet when the pension system changes frequently. One important explanation for the pension expectation bias is insufficient information. "From mouth to mouth" is an essential channel for individuals to obtain information, and this results in the converge of group decisions, namely peer effects. Lyu Youji used CHARLS data to verify the existence of the peer effect of pension expectations at the community (village) level. And he conducted an in-depth analysis of its robustness, mechanism, asymmetry, and long-term evolution law. During the report, Lyu Youji and the scholars at the conference conducted in-depth discussions on the definition of related concepts of the paper, the selection and elimination of influencing factors, and the method of relevance testing, and provided many ideas and methods for further improvement of the paper.

Liu Chenyuan spoke highly of this paper. She provided ideas for the improvement of the paper from the dimensions of measurement error, the value judgment of expectation bias, and the instrumental variable validity test.

"Noon Sunshine" is a regular academic exchange activity held by the School of Finance since the establishment of the school. It aims to help teachers focus on academic frontier issues, enhance academic exchanges, and promote scientific research cooperation.

Copywriter: Wang Zipian

Photography: Wang Xiaomeng

Editor: New Media Center, School of Finance, Liu Jingying,

Reviewer: Ma Jin, Hao Ren