 COVID-19 and investors' trading behavior: Evidence from the New Zealand equity marketFinn West Wilkinson, Marinela Adriana Finta and Olena Onishchenko Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, 2025, vol. 90, issue C Abstract: This paper examines the trading behavior of retail and institutional investors during the COVID-19 pandemic in New Zealand. Using transaction-level data, it compares how retail and institutional investors trade over the government announcements, lockdown, and reopening periods. Retail and institutional investors' trading intensifies around government announcements, which facilitates attenuating illiquidity during the lockdown. Nevertheless, while retail trading is substantially more prominent during the lockdown than over the control and reopening periods, institutional investors do not trade significantly more per se or on announcements during the lockdown but trade less during the reopening. Their trading also relates to contemporaneous returns, and their effects differ across certain sub-periods and on government announcements. Our findings suggest that while the announcements and emotions drive the retail investors' trading, institutions may trade more on firms' fundamentals. Keywords: Retail investors; Institutional investors; COVID-19; Government announcements; Attention-induced trading (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:pacfin:v:90:y:2025:i:c:s0927538x2400386x DOI: 10.1016/j.pacfin.2024.102634 Access Statistics for this article Pacific-Basin Finance Journal is currently edited by K. Chan and S. Ghon Rhee More articles in Pacific-Basin Finance Journal from Elsevier |
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