EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Trusting the stock market

Michael Haliassos and Michael Reiter

No 2005/27, CFS Working Paper Series from Center for Financial Studies (CFS)

Abstract: We provide a new explanation to the limited stock market participation puzzle. In deciding whether to buy stocks, investors factor in the risk of being cheated. The perception of this risk is a function not only of the objective characteristics of the stock, but also of the subjective characteristics of the investor. Less trusting individuals are less likely to buy stock and, conditional on buying stock, they will buy less. The calibration of the model shows that this problem is sufficiently severe to account for the lack of participation of some of the richest investors in the United States as well as for differences in the rate of participation across countries. We also find evidence consistent with these propositions in Dutch and Italian micro data, as well as in cross country data.

Keywords: Stock Market Participation; Trust; Portfolio Choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D1 D8 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/25463/1/51532633X.PDF (application/pdf)

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:zbw:cfswop:200527

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CFS Working Paper Series from Center for Financial Studies (CFS) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (econstor@zbw-workspace.eu).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:zbw:cfswop:200527