News or noise: Mobile internet technology and stock market activity

Nerissa C. Brown, W. Brooke Elliott, Russ Wermers and Roger White

No 21-10, CFR Working Papers from University of Cologne, Centre for Financial Research (CFR)

Abstract: Mobile internet devices reduce trading frictions and information search costs for investors, but also introduce attention-competing activities,such as social networking. We use exogenous nationwide and city-level outages of the Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) to investigate the effect of mobile internet technology on investors'information-gathering vs. attention-diverting activities. We find that trading volume and trading frequency surge by about 5% on days when mobile internet systems go dark, consistent with a greater role for devices (when not dark) in diverting the limited attention of investors away from information-gathering and trading - even when they are used by presumably more sophisticated investors.

Keywords: mobile technology; investor activity; stock market liquidity; limited attention; distraction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 G12 G14 L86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-cwa, nep-ict, nep-mst and nep-pay
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:cfrwps:2110

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