Personality traits and stock market participation

We analyze the relationship between personality traits and stock market participation. Our sample comes from combining personality trait scores and socioeconomic status information from the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966 with data from Finnish Central Securities Depository, the official register of stock holdings in Finland. We find the traits, and especially the subscales of the traits, to be significant predictors of stock market participation. In particular, exploratory excitability, extravagance, sentimentality, and dependence have large effects. One-standard-deviation changes in the subscale scores have marginal effects of up to 4 percentage points on the probability of participating in the stock market.     

Broadband internet and stock market participation

This paper examines the effect of broadband Internet on household stock market participation. By exploiting the expansion of broadband in the U.S. from 1999 to 2008, we find that the availability of broadband in a household's zip code significantly increases the likelihood of stockholding and the share of wealth invested in stocks. Moreover, this effect operates through a higher tendency to follow the stock market, indicating that broadband access reduces the information cost associated with stockholding. The effect of broadband access concentrates among people with high socioeconomic status. By contrast, the arrival of broadband has little impact on the portfolio choice and stock market following of people with low socioeconomic status, who most need to improve wealth accumulation. Our study sheds light on the role of technology development in household finance and the potential distributional effect of technology diffusion.     

Financial literacy and stock market participation

We have devised two special modules for De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) Household Survey to measure financial literacy and study its relationship to stock market participation. We find that the majority of respondents display basic financial knowledge and have some grasp of concepts such as interest compounding, inflation, and the time value of money. However, very few go beyond these basic concepts; many respondents do not know the difference between bonds and stocks, the relationship between bond prices and interest rates, and the basics of risk diversification. Most importantly, we find that financial literacy affects financial decision-making: Those with low literacy are much less likely to invest in stocks.     

Windfall gains and stock market participation

We exploit the randomized assignment of lottery prizes in a large administrative Swedish data set to estimate the causal effect of wealth on stock market participation. A $150,000 windfall gain increases the stock market participation probability by 12 percentage points among prelottery nonparticipants but has no discernible effect on prelottery stock owners. A structural life cycle model significantly overpredicts entry rates even for very high entry costs (up to $31,000). Additional analyses implicate pessimistic beliefs regarding equity returns as a major source of this overprediction and suggest that both recent and early-life return realizations affect beliefs.     

Uncertainty avoidance,loss aversion and stock market participation

Stock market participation differs a lot across countries. Cultural dimensions could be a potential factor for that. We show that indeed uncertainty avoidance (UAI) is linked to rates of stock market participation across countries. We can show even more that uncertainty avoidance has an indirect effect through loss aversion on stock market participation. The country level effects are confirmed on the individual level using data from a recent large-scale international survey, but on individual level there is also a strong effect of UAI on stock market participation after controlling for loss aversion. These results are robust after controlling for ambiguity aversion, and economic and demographic variables. Finally, we find that UAI is related to negative attitudes about stock markets in general.     

Inequality,stock market participation,and the equity premium

The last 30 years saw substantial increases in wealth inequality and stock market participation, smaller increases in consumption inequality and the fraction of indebted households, a decline in interest rates and the expected equity premium, as well as a prolonged stock market boom. In an incomplete markets, overlapping generations model I jointly explain these trends by the observed rise in wage inequality, decrease in participation costs, and loosening of borrowing constraints. After accounting for these changes, I show that the stock market played a major role in increasing wealth inequality. Crucially, these phenomena must be considered jointly; studying one independently leads to counterfactual predictions about others.     

Bank liquidity,stock market participation,and economic growth

We develop a growth model with banks and markets to reconcile the observed decreasing trend in the relative liquidity of many financial systems around the world with the increasing household participation in direct market trades. At low levels of economic development, the presence of fixed entry costs prevents the agents from accessing the market, and pushes them towards the banks, which provide high relative liquidity. We characterize the threshold after which the agents are rich enough to access the market, where the relative liquidity is lower, and show that the relative liquidity of the whole financial system (banks and markets) drops because of the increasing market participation. We provide some evidence consistent with this theoretical prediction: a one-unit increase in an index of securities market liberalization leads to a drop in the relative liquidity of between 17 and 27 per cent.     

An equilibrium model with restricted stock market participation

This article solves the equilibrium problem in a pure-exchange,continuous-time economy in which some agents face informationcosts or other types of frictions effectively preventing themfrom investing in the stock market. Under the assumption thatthe restricted agents have logarithmic utilities, a completecharacterization of equilibrium prices and consumption/investmentpolicies is provided. A simple calibration shows that the modelcan help resolve some of the empirical asset pricing puzzles.     

Institutional stock trading on loan market information

One of the most important developments in the corporate loan market over the past decade has been the growing participation of institutional investors. As lenders, institutional investors routinely receive private information about borrowers. However, most of these investors also trade in public securities. This leads to a controversial question: Do institutional investors use private information acquired in the loan market to trade in public securities? This paper examines the stock trading of institutional investors whose portfolios also hold loans. Using the Securities and Exchange Commission filings of loan amendments, we identify institutional investors with access to private information disclosed during loan amendments. We then look at abnormal returns on subsequent stock trades. We find that institutional participants in loan renegotiations subsequently trade in the stock of the same company and outperform trades by other managers and trades in other stocks by approximately 5.4% in annualized terms.     

Military experience and household stock market participation: Evidence from China

This paper examines the relationship between military experience and household stock market participation. Using data from the 2010 wave of China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), we find that the military experience promotes the households participating in the stock market. We further investigate how military experience affects a household investment decision. The results show that the level of risk-taking and social trust of military households mainly drives the positive nexus. Moreover, the length of military service rather than the age affects household equity investment decisions. We also find that the positive relationship is more prominent in high-income households, and low-education households.     

Audit opinions and information asymmetry in the stock market

This study analyses the relationship between the content of the audit reports and information asymmetry levels in the stock market for a sample of Spanish firms. By implementing an association study, we document (1) that firms with audit qualifications show higher information asymmetry levels than those with unqualified opinions; (2) firms with non‐quantified qualifications show higher informational asymmetry than firms with quantified qualifications; and (3) we find a stronger effect on the level of informational asymmetry in the case of going concern qualifications. Our findings suggest that audit qualifications reporting more uncertainty on firm accounting statements result in higher adverse selection risk.     

The medium is the message: Learning channels,financial literacy,and stock market participation

This paper investigates the effects of learning channels on stock market participation. More specifically, we investigate the direct effects of learning about financial matters from one's private network, financial advisors, and the media, as well as the moderating effects of financial literacy on the relationship between learning from these channels and stock market participation. Analyzing a unique cross-section data that combine survey data and bank register data on individual retail investors, we find that media is the only learning channel that increases the likelihood of owning stocks and the portfolio share invested in stocks. We also find that financial literacy has a significant moderating effect: Interactions point to the joint importance of learning from media and financial literacy for individuals' stock market participation. Our findings suggest implications to policymakers when designing financial education programs.     

Political crises and the stock market integration of emerging markets

This paper investigates the role of political crises in explaining the degree of stock market integration in emerging markets over the period 1991-2006. Using the International Crisis Behavior database, which contains detailed information on political crises around the world, and employing data on more than 15,500 firms, we assess whether political crises affect stock market integration in 19 emerging markets in South and East Asia, Latin America, and Central and Eastern Europe. We conclude that crises with certain characteristics generally reduce the level of stock market integration in these regions. In particular, the beginning of a political crisis, its severity, the involvement of the US in the conflict, and the number of parties involved in a crisis all have impacts on the level of stock market integration in these markets.     

Primacy in stock market participation: the effect of initial returns on market re-entry decisions

We examine whether initial returns influence investors’ decisions to return to the stock market following withdrawal. Using a survival analysis technique to estimate Finnish retail investors’ likelihood of stock market re-entry reveals that investors who experience lower initial returns are less likely to return, even after controlling for returns in the last month and average monthly returns for the duration of investing. This primacy effect is robust to accounting for endogeneity in investors’ exit decisions, and other behavioural biases such as recency and saliency of investment experience. Individual investors appear to be subject to primacy bias and tend to put a significant weight on initial experiences in re-entry decisions.     

Political institutions,stock market liquidity and firm dividend policy: Some international evidence

In this cross-country study, we draw on the dividend liquidity hypothesis and the political economy literature to examine whether political institutions affect the relationship between stock market liquidity and a firm’s dividend policy. In countries with weak political institutions, we expect that investors are less able to demand higher dividends for stocks with low liquidity. Using a sample of 52 countries, we show that the negative association between stock market liquidity and dividends is more pronounced in countries with sound political institutions, consistent with the “outcome” model of dividends. These results are stronger in countries with better legal institutions and weaker for firms with financial constraints.     

A simple asset pricing model with heterogeneous agents,uninsurable labor income and limited stock market participation

In this paper we study a simple two-period asset pricing model to understand the implications of uninsurable labor income risk and/or borrowing constraints, limited stock market participation, heterogeneous labor income volatilities, and heterogeneous preferences. We appraise the performance of each of these in matching moments of asset returns to the data and show that limited stock market participation generates a significantly large equity premium. We also show that the distribution of wealth between stock market participants and non-participants plays an important role in asset pricing, and that the effect of borrowing constraints on asset returns are similar to that of limited participation. Finally, we discuss the practical implications of our investigation, providing an appraisal of ongoing changes in asset returns.     

Corporate diversification and asymmetric information: evidence from stock market trading characteristics

We examine the relation between firm diversification and asymmetric information empirically using metrics drawn from the market microstructure literature. We find that the average diversified firm in our sample has somewhat less severe asymmetric information problems than a similarly constructed portfolio of stand-alone firms chosen to approximate the segments of the conglomerate. We also find that the information asymmetry of diversified firms is very similar to that of individual focused firms that approximate the conglomerates along several dimensions not including industry composition. We conclude that greater diversification is not on average associated with increased asymmetric information.     

Fertility policy and stock market participation: Evidence from the universal two-child policy in China

The Universal Two-Child Policy (UTCP) was implemented in 2016 to mitigate China's aging society. Based on the China Household Finance Survey in 2015 and 2017, this paper applies a difference-in-difference (DID) model to investigate the UTCP's impact on households' stock market participation behavior. The results show that the UTCP has a negative impact on stock market participation, which reduces households' stock market participation ratio as well as stock allocation in their financial portfolios. This decline is caused by the change in the risk preference of households. Furthermore, the impact of UTCP is more pronounced for households that are more risk averse, households that live in first- and second-tier cities, households that live in central and eastern China and households that have already had one child. Overall, this study provides new insights into the impact of China's UTCP on households' economic behavior and their decisions regarding financial market participation.     

Inflation,tax rules and the stock market

This paper shows how the interaction of tax rules and expected inflation can decrease substantially the share price per dollar of pretax earnings. The current analysis extends my earlier study [Feldstein (1978)] by recognizing corporate debt, retained earnings, and the role of diverse shareholder investments. As before, the analysis separates household and institutional investors.     

Liquidity costs,idiosyncratic volatility and expected stock returns

This paper considers liquidity as an explanation for the positive association between expected idiosyncratic volatility (IV) and expected stock returns. Liquidity costs may affect the stock returns, through bid-ask bounce and other microstructure-induced noise, which will affect the estimation of IV. We use a novel method (developed by Weaver, 1991) to eliminate microstructure influences from stock closing price-based returns and then estimate IV. We show that there is a premium for IV in value-weighted portfolios, but this premium is less strong after correcting returns for microstructure bias. We further show that this premium is driven by liquidity in the prior month after correcting returns for microstructure noise. The pricing results from equally-weighted portfolios indicate that IV does not predict returns either before or after controlling for liquidity costs. These findings are robust after controlling for common risk factors as well as analysing double-sorted portfolios based on IV and liquidity.