SEC commissioners should receive an analysis early next year of the potential costs and benefits of imposing a fiduciary duty on broker-dealers, Mark Flannery, who is the head of the SEC unit doing the research, told Financial Advisor magazine Tuesday.

Flannery, SEC Division of Economic and Risk Analysis director and chief economist, acknowledged he hasn’t learned much about the issue in his less than a month at the agency, but he said he will be given a briefing on the research by his staff later this week.

He came to the SEC after serving for nearly a quarter of a century as a finance professor at the University of Florida.