← Search

Journal of Financial Economics Vol. 143 No. 2 2022

Attention triggers and investors’ risk-taking

Marc Arnold1; Matthias Pelster2,3; Marti G. Subrahmanyam3

1 University of St.Gallen · 2 Paderborn University · 3 New York University

Abstract

This paper investigates how individual attention triggers influence financial risk-taking based on a large sample of trading records from a brokerage service that sends standardized push messages on stocks to retail investors. By exploiting the data in a difference-in-differences (DID) setting, we find attention triggers increase investors’ risk-taking. Our DID coefficient implies attention trades carry, on average, a 19 percentage-point-higher leverage than non-attention trades. We provide a battery of cross-sectional analyses to identify the groups of investors and stocks for which this effect is stronger.

DOI
10.1016/j.jfineco.2021.05.031
Volume
143
Issue
2
Pages
846-875
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

Cite