Peer Effects at Work: The Common Stock Investments of Co-workers

Hans Hvide and Per Östberg
Additional contact information
Per Östberg: University of Zurich and Swiss Finance Institute

No 12-34, Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series from Swiss Finance Institute

Abstract: Stock market behavior of individual investors is highly correlated with stock market behavior of their co-workers. For example, a ten percentage point increase in the fraction of co-workers that purchase stocks in a given month is associated with a two percentage point increase in the likelihood of individuals making a purchase. The high correlation exists even after taking controlling for individual socio-demographic characteristics and for time, stock, zip code, and plant fixed effects. Using data on family relations and on residential zip code, we show that the high correlation is not driven by peer effects at the family or zip code level. Moreover, workplace peer effects appear to be strong relative to geographical peer effects.

Keywords: individual investors; peer e¤ects; portfolio; social interaction; stock market; stock selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2012-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2179095 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 410 Gone

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:chf:rpseri:rp1234

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series from Swiss Finance Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ridima Mittal ().