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Journal of Banking & Finance Vol. 148 2023

What drives stock market participation? The role of institutional, traditional, and behavioral factors

Markku Kaustia1; Andrew Conlin2; Niilo Luotonen1

1 Aalto University · 2 Oulu University of Applied Sciences

open access

Abstract

We analyze stock market participation in 19 European countries, providing a composite view of the interplay and relative importance of established participation drivers. We jointly control for nearly all relevant drivers found in prior studies, which tend to introduce one novel variable at a time and often omit risk-aversion. Excellent full model predictive power decomposes into institutional (country) fixed effects (about 30% of total), traditional individual-level variables (50%), and more recently identified behavioral variables (20%). We sketch a hierarchical framework where factors’ effects vary by agents’ proneness to participate. We also challenge and complement existing interpretations given to sociability, IQ, trust, and life experiences.

DOI
10.1016/j.jbankfin.2022.106743
Volume
148
Pages
106743
Language
en
Sources
openalex crossref bibtex:phds-export.bib

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