Financial advisors and the intergenerational transmission of investment behaviour
3 Nov 2026
11:15 -12:30
Times shown in local time
Open to: All
Room W4.03 (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our Finance seminar, in collaboration with the Cambridge Corporate Governance Network
Speaker: Professor Markus Schmid, University of St Gallen
About the seminar topic
Children tend to hold the same securities as their parents, but why? Using account-level data from a medium-sized retail bank, we show that shared financial advisors significantly amplify this intergenerational similarity. When parents and children have the same advisor, the likelihood that children hold a parental security more than doubles, and trading synchronisation increases threefold, with 85% of synchronised trades among same-advisor pairs occurring on the very same day.
Using detailed data on advisor-client contacts, we decompose this effect into 2 distinct channels: cross-selling within the family and spillovers of advice between family members. The same-advisor effect increases with advisor distinctiveness, extends to adjustments in the equity share, and carries an unintended cost: because same-advisor parents and children hold more overlapping portfolios, their family-level diversification gain is smaller than that of families with different advisors. Financial advisors emerge as important but previously unrecognised actors for the intergenerational transmission of investment behaviour.
Speaker bio
Markus Schmid is a Professor of Finance at the University of St Gallen, Switzerland. He is Vice Dean of the School of Finance, and Academic Director of the Center for Financial Services Innovation sponsored by UBS. Schmid is also a Faculty Member of the Swiss Finance Institute (SFI) in Geneva and a Research Member of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) in Brussels. His research interests are mainly in empirical corporate finance, corporate governance and household finance. Markus’ research has been published in the Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Finance, The Accounting Review, Management Science, and Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, among others.
Register
No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Bet Brooke.