Adam Hayes,PhD,CFA

Socio-Economic Review (2024) (w/Yehudit Miletzky)
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This article explores how economic socialization serves as a bridge between individual economic behaviors and the broader social and cultural contexts that shape them. Drawing on a post-functionalist approach to socialization, the study examines the ultra-Orthodox Jewish (Haredi) community in Israel, where distinct gender roles, cultural norms and patterns of economic participation create a unique context for investigating divergent economic socialization pathways. Comparing four groups within the Haredi community. Analysis of an original survey study reveals how differential exposure to economic life leads to significant variations in financial decision-making and risk taking…

Economy & Society (2024) (w/Ambreen Ben-Shmuel)
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This paper explores the rise of financial influencers (‘finfluencers’) on social media and their impact on shaping financial subjectivities. Employing the dual theoretical frameworks of economy-as-communication and financialization of everyday life, we uncover how finfluencers transform individuals’ understanding of and engagement with personal finance through digital storytelling, strategic use of syntax and symbols, participatory engagement and diverse representation. Finfluencers make financial topics more accessible, but in doing so they also accelerate the financialization of everyday life by normalizing finance and investing as mainstream preoccupations…

Socius, 10 (2024) (w/Ambreen Ben-Shmuel & Vanessa Drach)
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As financial advice migrates online, “finfluencers” are democratizing access to financial knowledge, challenging the historically male-dominated advisory landscape. This mixed-methods study explores how gender shapes the creation and consumption of finfluencer content. Qualitative analysis reveals gendered advice patterns: Men emphasize quantitative aspects, whereas women incorporate narratives and personal stories. Experimental surveys uncover subconscious same-gender preferences in advice receptivity, contrasting with stated desires for gender-neutral guidance. These implicit affinities persist even when advice content is anonymized…

Theory & Society 53, 625-651 (2024)
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This paper explores the intersection of time and relational economic sociology. Building on Viviana Zelizer’s relational framework, I argue that analyzing the temporal dimensions of exchange provides insight into how social ties gain meaning through economic practices. The paper shows time’s dual role as both an organizing structure bounding action, and a dynamic element that actors leverage to shape transactional contexts. As structure, time offers culturally-available templates like schedules and rhythms that facilitate coordination and signify predictable social meanings befitting particular relational categories. Yet time also constitutes relational work itself; strategic timing, duration, pacing, and sequencing of interactions signal…

Socio-Economic Review 21(3): 1445-1472 (w/Max Besbris)
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Housing wealth is the single largest portion of household wealth in most Western societies today, yet little research has examined how individuals make decisions regarding the use of the housing wealth that they possess. In this paper, we leverage insights from relational economic sociology to understand how individuals’ subjective valuations and other economic judgments are influenced when space in a home is relationally earmarked. Using a series of original vignette experiments and survey tasks in conjunction with qualitative responses, we find that earmarking a room for a close social tie does indeed matter for valuation. Furthermore, we reveal that economic judgments are…

Social Psychology Quarterly, 85(4): 327-350. (w/ Rourke O’Brien & Barbara Kiviat)
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Individuals routinely satisfy borrowing needs by transacting in the market or by relying on social relations. In the market domain, price logic leads borrowers to choose the cheaper option; in the interpersonal domain, role-matching logic leads borrowers to choose the relation best matched to the act. But how do individuals choose when faced with options from each domain? Drawing on theories in economic sociology that assert the economic and the social are mutually constitutive, we posit that when market and interpersonal options appear in the same choice set, the characteristics of one option inflect how…

Social Forces, 99(3):1086-1112. (w/Rourke O’Brien)

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Ordinary individuals are increasingly charged with making investment decisions not only for themselves but also for close others. A child’s college savings account and a spouse’s retirement savings are instances where investing has become unmistakably relational. In this paper, we posit a theory of relational investing that extends Zelizer’s relational perspective from the domain of transactions to that of financial risk-taking. Through two original experiments, we demonstrate that (1) individuals are less risky with dollars earmarked for others, (2) risk tolerance varies as a function of for whom the dollars are earmarked, and (3) labeling accounts for culturally significant life-stage events…

Socio-Economic Review, 19(1): 83-110.
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How does algorithmic finance operate in society as it crosses the threshold into the hands of lay investors? This article builds on original ethnographic research into a new class of algorithmic trading programs known as ‘roboadvisors’—inexpensive, automated, digital financial platforms that enable ordinary people to invest very small minimum amounts and that rely to a large extent on passive, index strategies that follow the prescripts of Modern Portfolio Theory. The main argument of the article is that roboadvisors, representing an ethos of ‘low-finance’, are actively constructing passive investors by disciplining them through technologies that embody canonical models of financial economics. Roboadvisors and their algorithms reconfigure their users and objectify them…

Economy and Society, 49(4):562-595.

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Weber famously invoked “ideal types” as an analytic device with which to measure empirical reality against some hyper-rational fabrication. Case in point: non-professional (lay) investors appear to be the antithesis of rational economic man. They have been cast as less-informed, less-skilled, and less-knowledgeable than professional market practitioners, and with ample evidence that they tend to lose money in the market as a result. This study builds the case that a new class of algorithmic financial advisor, commonly known as “roboadvisors”, enacts lay investors as rational market actors. This is achieved through algorithmic devotion to modern portfolio theory (MPT)…

Sociological Theory, (38) 1: 16-35.
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This article builds the argument that Bourdieu’s dispositional theory of practice can help integrate the sociological tradition with three prominent strands of behavioral economics: bounded rationality, prospect theory, and time inconsistency. I make the case that the habitus provides an alternative framework to show how social and mental structure constitute one another, where cognitive tendencies toward irrationality can be either curtailed or amplified based on one’s position in the economic field and a person’s corresponding set of dispositions, ranging from more rational doxic dispositions to irrational allodoxic tendencies. Bridging economic sociology and behavioral economics, this work also bears on issues of persistent financial inequality …

Finance and Society, 5(1): 61-83.

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This article draws on and extends Viviana Zelizer’s social meaning of money framework in conjunction with new work in ‘relational accounting’ to suggest a sociological counterpoint, focusing in particular on the social and symbolic meaning attached to individual 401(k) retirement accounts. Following a market downturn, neoclassical and behavioral economics predict various types of behavioral responses, in particular loss aversion – where investors seek to increase risk-taking rather than locking in a sure loss (a loss is more painful to bear than an equivalent gain). A sociological theory that understands the shared meaning of retirement saving would predict something different, a behavior I call durable conservatism…

Theory, Culture, and Society, 36(4), 49–72.

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In this essay, I argue that cryptocurrencies and blockchains are important objects of general social science research and thought, but not for their ‘moneyness’ per se. Through a historical sociology of the antecedents and discourse leading up to Bitcoin, I show that it was never meant to be ‘money’ in the economic sense, but rather a solution to a technical puzzle for preventing opportunistic actors from double-spending digital ‘coins,’ as well as a fervent ideology surrounding online privacy and infringement of individual rights in the digital age. Drawing from themes in science and technology studies, I suggest that Bitcoin and other ‘cryptoassets’ are properly socio-technological assemblages that constitute new and important objects of social inquiry that must be understood beyond the myopic context of crypto-money. I conclude by proposing three alternative ontologies for blockchains relevant to economic, political, and social life: as systems of accounting, as organizational forms, and as institutions…

Click here for a list of other peer-reviewed research, related primarily to my masters thesis in economics …