The mission of the Business Research Center is to support interdisciplinary scholarship that informs theory, practice, and public policy pertaining to consumer financial decision-making. The Center will conduct basic research and more applied work to inform public policy. It will also engage in educational outreach aimed at improving consumer welfare by fostering conversations among consumer groups, public policy officials, business people serving financial markets, and researchers, and will foster conversations across the University of Colorado among scholars with common interests in these topics.
Research at the center focuses on understanding the ways consumers make complex financial decisions. For instance, the center received a Sloan and Sage Foundation grant to research how people select annuities. An annuity is a type of financial insurance for retirees; basically consumers pay a lump sum of money to a company that in exchange agrees to make periodic payments to the retirees for the rest of their lives.