Behavioural Finance podcast discussion with Dr Tracey West of Griffith University Business School

Adept Economics Director Gene Tunny caught up with Dr Tracey West of Griffith University Business School  recently in what ended up as a wide-ranging discussion about the emerging field of Behavioural Finance and its lessons for households, investors, and governments. To listen to the conversation, and to check out the show notes, head to the link below:

Behavioural Finance with Dr Tracey West of Griffith Business School

For the transcript of the conversation, read on.

Dr Tracey West Podcast Transcript 

Gene Tunny  00:00

Welcome to the Economics Explored podcast. I’m your host Gene Tunny. This is Episode 65 on Behavioural Finance. My guest today is Dr. Tracey west of the Griffith University Business School. Tracey is a lecturer in the school and she’s joining me today via zoom from the Gold Coast. Tracey, great to be speaking with you.

Dr Tracey West  00:25

Thanks for having me, Gene.

Gene Tunny  00:27

Excellent. Tracey I’d love to chat with you today about Behavioural Finance. So, this is a subject you lecture in. You teach undergraduates and postgraduates Behavioural Finance. I’ve spoken previously on this podcast with Dr. Brendan Markey-Towler about Behavioural Economics. Could we begin with an overview please of what Behavioural Finance is and how it’s related to Behavioural Economics please?

Dr Tracey West  01:01

Sure, so Behavioural Economics and Finance both attempt to understand and explain observed behaviours. So both fields differ from traditional economics and traditional finance series where we made a lot of assumptions in these theories about how people should behave, you probably covered that rational economic man, who was risk adverse, self-interested, utility maximiser and gets all available information to him and updates his beliefs according to a formula. Well Gene, I don’t know the last time that you used that method to make decisions that many people certainly do not so, those restrictive assumptions are not realistic. And so, both economics, behavioural economics and finance, don’t expect people to be rational robots and we look at all the biases as well as cultural and contextual factors that influence our decisions. So behavioural economics is a pretty broad field. And you might think of any field where governments intervene, like health, education and policing, law enforcement, paying taxes on time. Whereas Behavioural Finance is a really narrow focus on financial decisions of individuals and how that affects markets as well. But within finance, there’s a whole heap of different decisions that we make about our insurance, comparing products, you know, shopping, being a smart shopper, saving for retirement, so we don’t have any shortage of things to apply our tools to.

Gene Tunny  02:51

Okay, so it’d be good if we could explore some of those decisions. So, you talked about their investments? Are they saving for retirement, for example? Is Behavioural Finance, is it about households making decisions? Or is it relevant to people in financial markets? So, if you’re an investor in financial markets, is it relevant there to understanding how the market might move in the next few months? Or over the next year? Like? What’s the scope of it? Is it just relevant to households? Or is it a broader application?

Dr Tracey West  03:31

Both of those. So, let’s have a look at the individual decision making first. So, individuals are influenced by cognitive and emotional biases, as well as these other factors. We all have our own experiences, our families that we that brought us up have their own experiences. So, there’s a whole myriad of factors that affect our financial decision making, I’ll go into some of those. But if we have a look at cognitive biases first, they’re concerned with areas in information processing, we might focus on information that confirms what we already know and ignore contrary information. So in a financial context, that means we might pick an insurance company that we’re familiar with, because we’ve seen them at the retail shops or our parents had that same product, we might buy shares in a company that we’re familiar with, which is why those public listings of these formerly private, government owned companies like Qantas was so popular in the public because we were familiar with them. We also tend to prefer to do nothing over making a change. We like the status-quo or we have some inertia, like it can be difficult to get into the action to make a change. Sometimes we’re not confident about knowing what to do as well. And we can get anchored on information. So, when it comes to trading, shares, or even selling your own home, we can get anchored on the price that we bought it for us. So, when it comes to a decision about selling, we might have had a certain amount of profit in mind, or it might not be making money at the moment, so we don’t want to sell it because we’ll make a loss. So that sort of information processing areas really do affect many of our financial decisions. When you compare that to traditional theories, that is actually the wrong approach. So that’s how it doesn’t really correspond with traditional theories and the optimal way to make financial decisions.

Gene Tunny  05:45

Okay, yes, yeah. So, I think I’m getting this straight. Okay. So, for households, it means that we may not be making decisions that are within our own best interests, because we’ve got limited information, we’re worrying too much about the short term. Or we’re too worried about losing something we’ve got and not taking an amount of risk that might be desirable, or something like that. I’m just trying to formulate this.

Dr Tracey West  06:15

You hit the nail there on the head with worrying. Okay, there’s a lot of emotional biases as well, that really do probably overtake many of these financial decisions. That worry about losing money, that loss aversion is a really a key one. We feel the pain of loss greatly. And if we were to make money by the same amount, we would acknowledge it, but it wouldn’t be a big deal. But if we lose an amount of money, we really feel that loss, so that’s a key one. And sometimes we abdicate responsibility for making a decision, just to avoid that pain of getting it wrong. And sometimes it’s a lack of confidence in having financial knowledge. And we see that in women particularly there is a real gender gap with confidence in making financial decisions. But there are other emotional biases as well that what the other way we, we tend to see in men that they can be overconfident and taking risks in particular, so they can feel like they have really high levels of financial knowledge, and they’re getting information that no one else has they think. So that gives them the confidence to make trades to buy to sell to experiment somewhat. But making a lot of trades can result in high transaction costs, which can reduce the overall returns on that investment. So, we see it both ways, which is really interesting.

Gene Tunny  07:49

Yes, yes.  I was just thinking then, for some reason about crypto currency, and I know there are a lot of younger men who have got into cryptocurrency, and you’re thinking that, you know, this is the next big thing and no doubt, a lot of people have made money on crypto because it has had these volatile prices. But then I know a lot of people have lost money too. Have you looked into crypto, do you know if there’s any research into crypto?

Dr Tracey West  08:21

I have had a little look into crypto and it can be really hard to get the data on who is buying these things. So, it’s a little bit anecdotal and survey data so the sample sizes are small. But definitely anecdotally and even you can hear, you might hear conversations at the barbecue about this or walking by gardeners talking about it. And that’s when you know that it’s probably time to get out of the market is when everyone is doing it. But what’s what they’re not aware of is the regulation or lack thereof of these markets. So there is potential to lose everything. And I’ve had a colleague have Bitcoin stolen out of his digital wallet. So it’s not secure, it’s not safe, and that is the risk. But in the meantime, they are riding this momentum, this herding effect. And, you know, at the moment, they’re getting lucky out there.

Gene Tunny  09:16

Yes, yes. Could we go back to this loss aversion concept? I find this really interesting. What’s a practical example of that and how it could lead you to make the wrong or a bad financial decision, one that isn’t within in your long-term interests.

Dr Tracey West  09:37

Loss aversion typically relates and there is some overlapping biases here. So, you might get and the loss aversion theory it’s called Prospect Theory. They allow for people to have to have a reference point in making the decision so you’re evaluating an uncertain outcome when making an investment decision based on a reference point. Now the reference point, an easy example might be the price you bought something for. And let’s say it’s a share, you bought the share for of Apple for $100, let’s say. And at the moment, it’s trading at $220. Right? And so you might say, well, that’s an easy win, I can sell that one. If that’s what I want to do. Right, now I’ve made $20. But the reference point might have been you expected to make $150? Or, alternatively, maybe it’s lost money. So, it’s down to $80. Anyway, and so you’re making the decision? Do I hold this? Do I sell it, and maybe based on the information, maybe Apple have lost a big contract, and that big contract will affect them for the next five to 10 years in terms of their revenue. So perhaps the information that you’re getting in is that it’s time to sell this particular share, but you hold on to it, because you might lose some money. From a traditional from an optimal perspective, what you’ve paid for it in the past is a sunk cost. And it should not affect your future decision making. But people tend to hold on to these things for too long, even though it’s costing them money. And there’s overlapping, sometimes emotional attachments to things if you inherited the stock or the investment property. So it’s not just that bias, but there’s other biases to it to that as well, that come into play.

Gene Tunny  11:35

Okay, so you don’t cut your losses early enough. That’s one way of thinking about it. Yeah.

Dr Tracey West  11:40

Excellent. Yeah.

Gene Tunny  11:42

Oh, you hold on to a vintage car you own that’s just, yeah, money pit that is just costing you.

Dr Tracey West  11:49

Exactly, exactly something like that and there is research to suggest that more money has been lost for holding on to losers for too long in stock portfolios.

Gene Tunny  12:01

Okay, okay. Now, I think I’m getting this what you’re saying with the financial markets, it sounds like because of psychology and people having limited information. This, this idea, this efficient markets hypothesis doesn’t really hold and so we could get some stocks because of psychology. They will be overvalued say, you talked about privatisations of government assets in the past. So there was Qantas, there was Telstra, the Australian telecommunications company, which was sold in a few different trenches. And it’s possible because of our previous, our attachment or our recognition of those brands, they their stock prices could be higher when they’re floated than otherwise. Is that is that one lesson from this?

Dr Tracey West  13:03

Yeah, IPAs, initial public offerings do tend to go really well. And there’s public floats, did go really well. And many households for the first time, directly own shares through those processes. So actually, from an educational point of view, I think it was a really good opportunity for many households to have a go at taking some risk in the share market directly and experimenting with that a little and they were quite safe investments. So, it’s a good experience. And a might have overcome some previously poor experiences with stock holdings for people that experienced the Great Depression, and wars and other market crashes. Because that history with losing money in prior stock market crashes can keep people out of the market forever, which is a really interesting phenomenon. But yes, from a market perspective, let’s talk about some of the anomalies. So there are persistent anomalies in the market, which is contrary to that efficient market hypothesis and they shouldn’t persist. Like once they become known and published, they should be traded away. So there are many well-known ones like small firms tend to outperform large ones. Stocks underperform in September to December like the fourth quarter of the year, tend to outperform the market in January. Markets, usually up on Fridays and down on Mondays. And there’s some of the ones as well, and we’ve known about these for many, many years, if not decades now. But they persist. So there’s no rational explanation for many of these and it is because we are individuals acting in these markets. And financial analysts have a big role to play here as well. They are professionals in the industry, they are analysing company information all the time making buy or sell decisions. But that skill that they have that education that they’ve had, the experience that they have every day actually can exacerbate some biases, like overconfidence, bias, they can have overconfidence in their forecasting skills. They can have an illusion of knowledge bias that comes about by thinking that they have so much information and they have better information, then their opposition, their competitor. So they act on that. And there is the alternative as well. And when they think that they don’t have as good information as their competitors, so they follow, they follow the herd. And they don’t, sometimes they don’t want to see it be seen to be different, or to have a different view. Because then they stand out and they have to justify that. So they follow others, which abdicates their responsibility. So herding persists. And there’s a little a big body of research on herding yeah. And that drives momentum in markets. And that overconfidence and that momentum can lead to bubbles. And then when the bubble bursts, then many people are affected. And we don’t seem to learn a lot from peoples experiences in this respect.

Gene Tunny  16:35

That’s true. So, in the 2008 financial crisis, where we had the collapse of firms such as Lehman Brothers. I mean, a lot of people pointed out at the time, well, we have seen this before we saw it in well, it was in 1929, and also in 1997. And in the.com, boom and bust in the early 2000s. So it’s not as if we haven’t seen it before but we keep making mistakes. We think we’re smarter, don’t we? So in the lead up to the and this was one of the points you made is that overconfidence in the lead up to the financial crisis, we had all of these new value at risk models where we thought we were modelling the volatility, the risk that these investors we’re taking on scientifically, and it turned out we weren’t so yes, yes.

Dr Tracey West  17:32

Well, the GFC, a lot of information was hidden from the market, from the ratings agencies and from the regulators. There is that information asymmetry that exists in the financial services sector as well, because it can be made to look so complex, and it can be complex, it can be overly complex, but it’s very smart people deliberately design it so and tell everyone who asked some questions, not to worry, you know, we’ve got it sorted. And then they can provide the nice, glossy brochures on these, these bonds, mortgage backed securities and all of that sort of thing with that without providing the nitty gritty information that people really need to know to make an informed decision.

Gene Tunny  18:24

Yeah. So have you seen The Big Short Tracey? Yes, because that’s a good example of the information that was hidden, because those mortgages that they that they piled up and then labelled as a mortgage backed security, like they were hundreds or thousands of mortgages in these parcels and I think that trader, I forget his name, but the one who, who undertook The Big Short and made huge amount of money, a couple of billion or whatever it was. I think he went and look through those mortgages and got a sample of them and figured out that a lot of them were just yeah, they weren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.

Dr Tracey West  19:07

It was based on cash flows from mortgage customers that weren’t what they call ninja loans, no income, no job, no assets. And so that raises the red flags, but you had to look into the details and be aware of what was going on in the market and the competitive nature of these financial institutions kind trying to just write more loans to get the origination fees and then selling off the risk.

Gene Tunny  19:39

Yes, yeah.

Dr Tracey West  19:39

Once you understood that’s what’s happening, I suppose. Everything seems obvious in hindsight, doesn’t it?

Gene Tunny  19:45

Oh, yes. Yes, yes. Okay. So I might consider what does this all mean, for how government should regulate so for a long time now, there’s been a record recognition that there is a role for government in regulating financial markets and we’ve had various different types of regulation. And we’ve had various different attitudes whereby with after the depression, there was financial markets in the US and also in other countries are very heavily regulated. In the 1990s, there was a relaxation of some of those regulations and that was alleged to have then led to the financial crisis Now, where was after the financial crisis there were changes in regulations, tighter regulations. I’m not sure what where we are now, I think in Australia, we might be relaxing some regulations. I’m wondering how does behavioural finance how, what are the lessons of behavioural finance for the way we should regulate financial decisions, savings investments by households, and also how we should regulate financial markets? That’s probably a lot to go over. But others? Do you have any thoughts on that? Tracy?

Dr Tracey West  21:19

Yes, so research, the behavioural sciences research shows us how difficult these decisions are for us, given our limited capacities, unlimited knowledge, difficulty and accessing perfect information, because there’s information asymmetries, and just how bad we are at making good decisions for ourselves. There are similar difficulties with saving for retirement, for example, that self-control issues. Many of us have financial struggles, and we need to spend the money now so putting money away for some future unknown certain problem can be impossible for many households that are living paycheck to paycheck. And we also have some structural changes in our job markets, about the types of jobs that we have these gig economy workers, casualization of the workforce, it can make it harder to plan because your income is more volatile. So, there’s a whole heap of things going on in our economy at the moment that make these decisions particularly difficult. And I don’t know if access to the internet, and everything that we can get off the internet helps sometimes, because we can be overwhelmed with data and not know where to start. So, I am absolutely on the bandwagon of more regulation but it is a cyclical government ideology thing depending on what government of the day is and their ideology about big government or small government depends on the approach to decision making on regulation. But surely, from the lesson of the GFC, we had Ben Bernanke in the Fed reserve at that time, he didn’t believe in regulation, he believed in free markets. And I think the GFC was a direct result of not intervening, even though he was one. So I’m grateful to be in Australia, I do think we have a good balance. But at the moment, we are leaning to unwinding some important regulations. And one of those is the Responsible Lending laws. And the Responsible Lending laws were bought in actually a decade ago. But they’re designed to make lenders do some more checks and balances to ensure that consumers going for loans can afford to repay, it’s putting the onus on the banks, as opposed to putting so much onus on the individuals. And look, I don’t want to add the gate individual responsibility, right when they’re taking out a loan, it is their responsibility to know what their repayment obligation is, what the interest rate is. But what I’m saying to you is that research shows us sometimes that the legal documentation that you get with a loan is actually quite sophisticated. And it can take a high level of education to actually understand and unpick what’s in those documents. And that’s actually not fair for many people in our population to have that expectation. The documentation can be designed to set up so I’m talking about the choice architecture here the information that is presented to us. It can be designed to influence our decisions. So for example, a credit card statement can have the minimum repayment amount in bold writing in the middle of the page. And if you only make the minimum repayment amount, then you are going to be paying more interest to that bank. Right. So, they they’re incentivized to do these sorts of things. We need government to step in to regulate how statements are presented to people. How what information providers need to provide that that’s my belief.

Gene Tunny  25:32

So that’s interesting. Yeah, sorry. Sorry, Tracy. I was just thinking, I mean, this is more of that. This is a lack of knowledge, is it not saying you must do this, but that. Oh, well, the companies must do this. But You’re not forcing people to pay a certain amount you’re trying to, to set it up to provide the information? That means I’ll make a sensible decision. Is that what you’re saying?

Dr Tracey West  25:53

Absolutely. But companies who are maximising their profits and not going to do this on their own?

Gene Tunny  26:02

Hmm.

Dr Tracey West  26:02

So, we need government to intervene somewhat to tell companies how to present information so that people are nudged in the right direction. And it’s a tough balance. But I think that’s why regulation has to be a bit more prescriptive. So you’re not you’re not, you know, the bank can still have all the information, minimum payments on the page and all of that sort of stuff, but they should provide more information to the consumer, to make them aware of the consequences of only making the minimum repayment.

Gene Tunny  26:39

Yes, yes. So I mean, my bias I’m, I generally have a Laissez-Faire or free market bias, but I do recognise that there is a need for some regulation, because there is just such a great potential for people to be taken advantage of, with financial decision making so much opportunity for sharp practice bordering on fraud and we saw that with you probably remember this with the Storm financial case.

Dr Tracey West  27:11

We saw it with Storm Financial, so those customers weren’t aware that was the finance company. They thought it was a bank and protected by the same regulations as a bank and it’s not. So yes, it was Stone Financial, the Royal Commission into financial services highlighted so many fraudulent activities. Advisors forging signatures, unauthorised withdrawals, charging customers for advice that wasn’t delivered, selling people insurance that they could never claim on. Like, how is it possible that we don’t value the importance of regulation in this space? I don’t know. Because the end game is that these people are at the bottom of the wealth distribution. And that cost the government money might not cost the government as much money now. But it costs them in the long run, right?

Gene Tunny  28:10

Yeah. So, I’ll put some links in the show notes to info on that Storm Financial scandal here in Australia. This was a business that I think was headquartered in Townsville in North Queensland, which is where I grew up, interestingly enough. And so, I recognise the brand, the bank branches where these people were, they were signed up to storm financial and it was just extraordinary. So, you had people like couples who were pensioners, and they had no maybe earning 50,000 a year in, in gross income, and yet they were signed up to this investment product. They were making leveraged investments in the share market, so margin loans, and it was like, a million dollars plus or something. It’s just absolutely absurd and then when the market crashed, they were wiped out and yeah, absolutely shocking scandal.

Dr Tracey West  29:14

The end result for government is these people rely on the pension and instead of being fully funded retirees, right, so it does have a cost to government of not intervening here. Yeah, in this space and overseeing these companies which take advantage of people.

Gene Tunny  29:30

Okay, so in terms of the, what we’ve done, some of the regulations that are in place, so in Australia, we have compulsory superannuation contributions, so nine and a half percent superannuation guarantee rate, so employers have to pay nine and a half percent of other people’s wages and salaries have to pay that into their super account with a superannuation fund. That’s different from the US it that they have some special tax treatment for retirement savings have you looked at that? Is it the 401k?

Dr Tracey West  30:08

Yeah, 401k seems to be company specific. So if you work for a particular company, they will set up a retirement account for you. And there’s some sort of Co contribution voluntary payment thing. It’s not compulsory. If you’re not with a company that provides one then you miss out. And a lot of the companies they were there provide health insurance to their employees to like it’s a different setup to what we have in Australia, thank goodness. So many countries worldwide look at our gold standard system. It really is. It’s not perfect. But it does overcome that inertia and status quo bias that people have to not do anything and self-control problems. So the design is way ahead of its time, in that respect and in that it is compulsory. We had the retirement income review come out just a couple of weeks ago, not long ago at all. And it says it does a good job in meeting its intended purpose, but it does advantage people who earn high incomes. And who can take advantage of the tax favoured nature of it and make the voluntary contributions as well. So yeah, there’s some inequalities in the system, because it is tied to your income. But overall, I like it, because it does harness those biases, and it’s a really good nudge.

Gene Tunny  31:43

Yes, yeah. So it sounds like behavioural finance could justify this policy, of compulsory superannuation that was put in place 28 years ago now in Australia. So that yeah, that’s, that’s good. And we also have regulations around investments you can make, too. So there are, so in Australia, if you want to invest in to make an investment in a new like a startup company, and it’s not being listed on the stock exchange, then that you have to be a sophisticated investor. So you have to have a certain amount of assets or make a certain amount of money a year, and I think they might have similar rules in the US. So would you argue you could justify those type of rules with behavioural finance? Have you looked at those rules at all Tracy?

Dr Tracey West  32:37

I haven’t had a good look at the sophisticated investor rules. I understand why they do that they do that. They do that when funds are buying initial public offerings as well, they make assumptions that they know what they’re doing and I think that’s okay to a certain extent, like my focus isn’t on that end of the distribution, wealth distribution, if you’re if you’re like, my focus tends to be on how can we help those people that need help more than the other ones who perhaps have that buffer zone and can afford to take some risk and maybe lose some money. Yes, I have some, some buffer wealth there.

Gene Tunny  33:17

Okay, so is education and oh, I guess you’re saying that even with all of the Money Smart education that we’ve done in Australia over the last couple of decades, you still need some type of regulation or nudging because it doesn’t appear to be fully absorbed. People like Scott Pape, the Barefoot Investor, they’re popular, but they’re only reaching so many people. Is that what you’re saying? So is there still a role for more education for more people like Scott Pape?

Dr Tracey West  33:51

Oh, absolutely and I actually quite like what Scott Pape’s doing from behavioural finance standpoint, he is incorporating in his books, and discussing money in the household to be a social activity to making it social, it’s really important. He’s designed it to be easy so it’s a simple plan. And I quite liked his ideas of getting kids involved in searching out for cheaper products by comparing your insurance products and doing all of that for mum and dad is actually quite genius. So I really like some of his ideas from the behavioural science point of view and all power to him. So, recently, you might have seen in the headlines that Victoria has banned school banking. So school banking has come under the scrutiny of ASIS so they put an inquiry out about it last year or the year before, because banks have taken the opportunity to commercialise that. So they’re coming into the classroom with their branded products, I mean, come on with bank has had this market sign up for quite a long time and it’s worth billions of dollars to them because of the inertia of students setting up these accounts and when they leave school, they don’t change banks. So it’s worth billions to them. And it started way back when Commbank was a public bank. So it’s, it didn’t start out this way but it ended up this way. And they are talking about credit cards with students way too young. So unfortunately, they’ve undone themselves by being so opportunistic. So schools now I mean, Victoria has banned it and other states will probably follow and it is a shame because modelling a savings habit, so when mum and dad stick the gold coin in the puzzle book every week, it’s modelling a savings habit and children and a discussion about what they’re saving for. Watching it accumulate over time, having a look at the statements and seeing what interest is accrued. I mean, it’s a missed opportunity, I think for those discussions. Yeah, schools have to find other ways to incorporate it into the curriculum. But it is a bit ad hoc and I’ve been working on a project talking to older school children actually about where they learn about money. Many of them do not make the connections from their math class about compound interest to money and investing. They just don’t connect the dots. Yeah, so that’s a shame. If they’re doing a business course in high school, they do a pretty good job at teaching them about inflation and setting up business plans and saving and superannuation. They do a good job. But if the student is not in business, then they are missing out on this whole conversation.

Gene Tunny  36:54

Yes, yes, I agree. With the school’s like, I wonder why they just don’t set up a competitive process. They say, well, to Commbank and to Westpac at the National Australia Bank, bid for the opportunity to present your products to each school and show what you’re offering. So come up with a really low fee option where you’re not going to rip off the students that that sort of thing. So I wouldn’t want to be discouraging them from banking, but I’d want to make sure that it was open to as many different providers as possible. So it’s just not Commonwealth Bank going in there.

Dr Tracey West  37:32

I think administratively it’s difficult for the schools to manage so many different bank accounts. That’s one problem and Commonwealth we’re actually paying many schools the commission to host their bank $400,000, or something they spent in Queensland, I think it was. So, it’s just become a bit perverted, I think and not meeting the original intention of this scheme. So maybe it does need to reset maybe some rules around it. And maybe people like me have to spend more time in schools providing independent, unbiased information and I would like to do that. It’s just a matter of how do you scale it going into each school, and I don’t know, the challenge sometimes seems a bit overwhelming.

Gene Tunny  38:28

Okay. Okay. Well, yeah, I hope you are able to, to make those inroads there, Tracy. Yeah. Before we wrap up is there any other points you’d like to make?

Dr Tracey West  38:43

Oh, I don’t think so. When I’m teaching students, I hope that I develop professionals that go into industry with better product design in mind, like thinking of lay people and how they need help and knowledge, easy to understand information. And I suppose that’s what I hope to achieve, doing what I do. So hope over time, we get a little bit of change here. And the pendulum swings back in the consumers interests, more so than it is now.

Gene Tunny  39:19

Okay, great. And finally, where can we find more about your work? Is your Griffith University staff page? Is that the best place to?

Dr Tracey West  39:30

Yeah, we have a experts page on Griffith where you can search for me. My work is up on Google Scholar as well. So you could do a Google search on Google Scholar for me and I can provide you with some and I you can find me on LinkedIn as well. So I can provide you with this links. Do you post my activities on LinkedIn? So I’m quite active on there.

Gene Tunny  39:54

Great. Okay, I’ll make sure I put those links in the show notes. Dr. Tracy West. Griffith University on the Gold Coast. Thanks so much for your time.

Dr Tracey West  40:04

Thank you so much Gene. I enjoyed it.

Gene Tunny  40:06

Excellent.

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