Richard Thaler’s cameo in the Oscar contending movie “The Big Short” was a rare moment of glamour for an economist who built his career studying the follies of human behavior.
The 70-year-old University of Chicago professor, whose stock-picking theories drive the Undiscovered Managers Behavioral Value Fund, is getting discovered in more ways than one. The small-cap mutual fund, which beat 99 percent of its Bloomberg peers over the past three and five years, has almost doubled in size to $3.7 billion during the past 12 months as investor deposits surged.