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Review of Finance Vol. 23 No. 1 2019

Does Information Acquisition Alleviate Market Anomalies? Categorization Bias in Stock Splits

Dongmin Kong1; Chen Lin2; Shasha Liu3

1 Zhongnan University of Economics and Law · 2 University of Hong Kong · 3 Jinan University

Abstract

Using a unique proprietary account-level trading dataset in China, we investigate how active information acquisition alleviates price-based return comovement, a typical anomaly in stock splits. We find that: 1) individual trading drives the comovement and the trading correlation between split stocks and the low-price portfolio increases significantly after splits; 2) individuals can learn the firm fundamentals through information acquisition, which effectively alleviates their categorized bias; and 3) the role of information acquisition is more significant in environments characterized by greater uncertainty. Our results are robust to different specifications and alternative measures. Taken together, this paper emphasizes the important role of information acquisition in alleviating behavioral bias and improving decision-making.

DOI
10.1093/rof/rfx028
Volume
23
Issue
1
Pages
245-277
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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