Googlization and retail trading activity

Christophe Desagre and D’Hondt, Catherine
Additional contact information
Christophe Desagre: Université catholique de Louvain, LIDAM/LFIN, Belgium
D’Hondt, Catherine: Université catholique de Louvain, LIDAM/LFIN, Belgium

No 2021001, LIDAM Reprints LFIN from Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain Finance (LFIN)

Abstract: A large body of literature documents a positive relationship between the Google Search Volume Index (SVI) and market returns or volumes. Such findings are consistent with a buying pressure due to increased attention. Unlike most of the studies that use market data, we use the trading accounts for a sample of retail investors. The advantage is twofold; we are able to disentangle purchases from sales, and our results are not biased by any institutional trading. We find that the relationship between the SVI and retail trading activity is positive but not stronger for purchases than for sales. We also demonstrate evidence of a bidirectional causality between attention and trading activity, though contemporaneous effects predominate. Our results are robust to controls based on sociodemographics or subjective investor characteristics, as well as various specifications of the SVI and different measures of trading activity.

Keywords: Investor attention; Google SVI; Retail investors (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 G11 G40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-01-01
Note: In: Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, 2021, vol. 29, 100453
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ajf:louvlr:2021001

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbef.2020.100453

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LIDAM Reprints LFIN from Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain Finance (LFIN) Voie du Roman Pays 34, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Séverine De Visscher ().