Marshalling a large and novel dataset of cell towers and using the purchase of Yu’E Bao as a proxy for Chinese households’ investment in money market funds, this paper investigates how broadband infrastructure affects the welfare of households in wealth management. We find that with the improvement in broadband infrastructure, Internet service becomes more available to households and they tend to convert bank deposits with suppressed rates of interest into money market funds that provide less regulated and hence higher rates of return. Further analyses show that the effect of broadband infrastructure on the conversion of bank deposits into money market funds is more pronounced in counties with lower density of bank branches and among less educated people. Our empirical findings suggest that by alleviating the policy distortions imposed on the traditional banking sector, online financial products and service are powerful tools in the promotion of financial inclusion.

This study investigates the impact of heightened investor attention on stock price manipulation. To establish causality, we employ daily repeated quasi-natural experiments, where investors’ attention is influenced exogenously by price rounding rather than by stocks’ fundamental information. Our findings demonstrate that stocks included in the Winner List attract significant investor attention, which leads to increased stock price manipulation. A two-stage channel analysis reveals that this increased investor attention exacerbates stock price manipulation through noise trading. Moreover, the positive relationship between investor attention and stock price manipulation is more pronounced in stocks with higher firm-specific information asymmetry, fewer rational investors, weaker external monitoring, higher costs of arbitrage, and non-shortability. Additional analyses indicate that this positive relationship intensifies during periods of heightened investor sentiment, greater economic policy uncertainty and increased geopolitical risk. Our study provides original evidence that the saliency of information exacerbates stock price manipulation and destabilizes financial markets.