About

Dr. Lauren Eckhardt is the full-time director of the Atkinson Behavioral Research Lab at UC San Diego's Rady School of Management, where she oversees behavioral research focused on how individuals form judgments and make decisions in business contexts. The lab, established in 2013 with support from former UC San Diego Chancellor Richard Atkinson, supports experiments involving a participant pool of over 2,000 undergraduates each quarter, primarily for class credit. Dr. Eckhardt collaborates with faculty and graduate students, employing various methodologies to generate impactful insights that shape business practices across industries. The lab's research is integral to the Rady community, fostering innovation in behavioral science. Dr. Eckhardt manages the operational aspects of the lab, including study scheduling, facilities, and compliance requirements such as IRB approval and CITI training. She also supervises undergraduate research assistants and volunteers, promoting experiential learning and research engagement among students. Her leadership ensures the lab's role as a cornerstone of behavioral research at UC San Diego, contributing to the advancement of understanding decision-making processes in business environments.

Research topics

• Economics
• Financial economics
• Computer Security
• Political Science
• Business
• Monetary economics
• History
• Computer Science
• Mathematics
• Geography
• Accounting
• Econometrics
• Virology
• Law
• Psychology
• Biology
• Statistics

Selected publications

• Data and Code for: Cross-State Strategic Voting

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2026-01-06

  datasetOpen access

  We estimate that 3.1% of US voters, or 6.1 million individuals, were registered to vote in two states in 2020, opening up the possibility for them to choose where to vote. Double registrants are concentrated in the wealthiest zipcodes and respond to both incentives and costs, disproportionately choosing to vote in swing states (higher incentive) and states which automatically send out mail-in ballots (lower cost). We call this behavior Cross-State Strategic Voting. While others have documented strategic incentives on who to vote for, this paper is the first to consider strategic incentives on where to vote.

  PublisherDOI

• Data and Code for: Cross-State Strategic Voting

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2026-01-06

  datasetOpen access

  We estimate that 3.1% of US voters, or 6.1 million individuals, were registered to vote in two states in 2020, opening up the possibility for them to choose where to vote. Double registrants are concentrated in the wealthiest zipcodes and respond to both incentives and costs, disproportionately choosing to vote in swing states (higher incentive) and states which automatically send out mail-in ballots (lower cost). We call this behavior Cross-State Strategic Voting. While others have documented strategic incentives on who to vote for, this paper is the first to consider strategic incentives on where to vote.

  PublisherDOI

• Data and Code for: Cross-State Strategic Voting

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2026-03-31

  datasetOpen access

  We estimate that 3.1% of US voters, or 6.1 million individuals, were registered to vote in two states in 2020, opening up the possibility for them to choose where to vote. Double registrants are concentrated in the wealthiest zipcodes and respond to both incentives and costs, disproportionately choosing to vote in swing states (higher incentive) and states which automatically send out mail-in ballots (lower cost). We call this behavior Cross-State Strategic Voting. While others have documented strategic incentives on who to vote for, this paper is the first to consider strategic incentives on where to vote.

  PublisherDOI

• Political Sentiment and Innovation: Evidence from Patenters

  Review of Financial Studies · 2025-04-28

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract We document political sentiment effects on U.S. inventors. Democratic inventors are more likely to patent (relative to Republicans) after the 2008 election of Obama but less likely after the 2016 election of Trump. These effects are at least twice as strong among politically active Democrats and are present even within firms and within firm$ \times $technology. We also show that partisans tend to cluster in technologies (e.g., Democrats in Biotechnology and Republicans in Weapons), so that sentiment effects aggregate to more patents in the technologies dominated by the winning party.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Entity Neutering

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Portfolio‐Driven Disposition Effect

  The Journal of Finance · 2024-08-21 · 42 citations

  articleOpen access

  ABSTRACT The disposition effect for a stock significantly weakens if the portfolio is at a gain, but is large when it is at a loss. We find this portfolio‐driven disposition effect (PDDE) in four independent settings: U.S. and Chinese archival data, as well as U.S. and Chinese experiments. The PDDE is robust to a variety of controls in regression specifications and is not explained by extreme returns, portfolio rebalancing, tax considerations, or investor heterogeneity. Our evidence suggests that investors form mental frames at both the stock and the portfolio levels and that these frames combine to generate the PDDE.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Loan Fee Anomaly: A Short Seller’s Best Ideas

  Management Science · 2024-10-09 · 17 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We find that equity loan fees, which have been largely ignored by the anomalies literature, are the best predictor of cross-sectional returns. When compared with 102 other anomalies and other short-selling measures, the loan fee anomaly has the highest monthly long-short return (4.01%), the highest monthly Sharpe Ratio (0.66), and, unlike other anomalies, exhibits strong persistence throughout the sample. Although prior work has shown that existing anomalies reside in high loan fee stocks, we find that 42% of loan fee outperformance is due to unique information not contained in other anomalies. Future papers that examine cross-sectional predictors of returns should include the single most effective predictor: loan fees. This paper was accepted by Victoria Ivashina, finance. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.00152 .

  PublisherDOI

• Cross-State Strategic Voting

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2023-02-01

  reportOpen access

  We estimate that 3.1% of US voters, or 6.1 million individuals, were registered to vote in two states in 2020, opening up the possibility for them to choose where to vote.Double registrants are concentrated in the wealthiest zipcodes and respond to both incentives and costs, disproportionately choosing to vote in swing states (higher incentive) and states which automatically send out mail-in ballots (lower cost).We call this behavior Cross-State Strategic Voting.While others have documented strategic incentives on who to vote for, this paper is the first to consider strategic incentives on where to vote.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Political Sentiment and Innovation: Evidence from Patenters

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2023-08-01 · 6 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We document political sentiment effects on US inventors.Democratic inventors are more likely to patent (relative to Republicans) after the 2008 election of Obama but less likely after the 2016 election of Trump.These effects are 2-3 times as strong among politically active partisans and are present even within firms over time.Patenting by immigrant inventors (relative to nonimmigrants) also falls following Trump's election.Finally, we show partisan concentration by technology class and firm.This concentration aggregates up to more patenting in Democratdominated technologies (e.g., Biotechnology) compared to Republican-dominated technologies (e.g., Weapons) following the 2008 election of Obama.

  PublisherDOI

• The Partisanship of Financial Regulators

  Review of Financial Studies · 2023-04-21 · 41 citations

  article1st author

  Abstract We analyze the partisanship of Commissioners at the SEC and Governors at the Federal Reserve Board. Using recent advances in machine learning, we identify partisan phrases in Congress, such as “red tape” and “climate change,” and observe their usage among regulators. Although the Fed has remained relatively nonpartisan throughout our sample period (1930–2019), we find that partisanship among SEC Commissioners rose to an all-time high during the 2010-2019 period, driven by more-partisan Commissioners replacing less-partisan ones. Partisanship at the SEC appears in both the language of new SEC rules and the voting behavior of SEC Commissioners. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• William Mullins

  University of California, San Diego

  45 shared

• Zhi Da

  39 shared

• Pengjie Gao

  31 shared

• J. Anthony Cookson

  University of Colorado Boulder

  30 shared

• Christopher A. Parsons

  University of Southern California

  25 shared

• Jonathan Brogaard

  19 shared

• Edward Dickersin Van Wesep

  19 shared

• Jared Williams

  Texas Tech University

  16 shared

Labs

• Atkinson Behavioral Research LabPI

Awards & honors

• The Atkinson Behavioral Research Lab received foundational s…