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We investigate whether limited investor attention is a factor in the effectiveness of institutional shareholder activism. Prior research has shown that an inability of market participants to allocate sufficient intellectual effort to the investment decision can have an impact on market price and volume behavior. We extend this research in an applied setting by considering the effectiveness of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) focus list, whose aim is to improve the performance and corporate governance of target firms. We find that the share price and volume response to being included in the focus list is a function of the investor attention in a stock, which in turn has an impact on the subsequent managerial response. This suggests that when attention is a scarce cognitive resource, the proactive exploitation of news signals can be an efficient activism strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to bridge the gap between the theory underlying divergence of opinion (DOP) and a cognitive concept termed as attention by specifically focussing on the volume and price behaviour in initial public offering (IPO) settings.

Employing the hierarchical regression for a sample of 282 Malaysian fixed price IPOs issued from 2004 to 2014, this research investigated the effect of investors’ attention on other information that complements the information revealed by initial return on DOP. Measure of market adjusted turnover (AbTO) from non-IPO setting was used to capture the DOP in the after-market, while investors’ attention was on a dichotomise scale variable which was captured by the increase/decrease of the Google search index (GOGC2) on the month of listing compared to a month prior to listing.

The findings indicate that attention moderates the relationship between initial return (also surrogates underpriced IPOs) and DOP. The findings suggest that disagreement to initial returns is reduced, while liquidity in the after-market is promoted, when investors pay more attention to other information that complements price change. The findings also indicate that behavioural tendency is less when individual participation is weak.

This paper highlights the importance of interaction effects in explaining the behavioural tendency in the after-market.

The weak individual investors’ participation and greater attention reduce the market inefficiency in Malaysia.

The finding is consistent with the view that the level of individual investors’ participation and information disclosure requirements has an implication on behavioural bias, which affects DOP in the after-market.

This study disentangles the investor-base effect and the information effect of investor attention. The former leads to a larger investor base and higher stock returns, while the latter facilitates the dissemination of information among investors and impacts informational trading.

Using positive volume shocks as a proxy for increased investor attention, this study evaluates the impacts of the investor-base effect and the information effect of investor attention on market correction following extreme daily returns in the US stock market from 1966 to 2018.

This study finds that the investor-base effect increases subsequent returns of both daily winner and daily loser stocks. The information effect leads to economically less significant return reversals for both the daily winner and daily loser stocks. These two effects tend to have economically more significant impacts on the daily loser stocks. The economic significance of these two effects is also related to firm size and the state of the stock market.

This study is the first to disentangle the investor-base effect and the information effect of increased investor attention. The evidence that the information effect facilitates the dissemination of new information and impacts stock returns contributes to the strand of studies on the impact of investor attention on market efficiency. This evidence also contributes to the strand of studies analyzing the impact of informational trading on stock returns. In addition, this study provides evidence for market overreaction and the subsequent correction. The results for up and down markets contribute to the literature on the investors' trading behavior.

This paper aims to explore the interaction between investor attention and green security markets, including green bonds and stocks.

This study takes the Baidu index of “green finance” as the proxy for investor attention and constructs several generalized prediction error variance decomposition models to investigate the interdependence. It further analyzes the dynamic interaction between investor attention and the return and volatility of green security markets using the rolling time window.

The empirical analysis and robustness test results reveal that the spillovers between investor attention and the return and volatility of the green bond market are relatively stable. In contrast, the spillover level between investor attention and the green stock market displays significant time-varying and asymmetric effects. Moreover, the volatility spillover between investor attention and green securities is vulnerable to major financial events, while the return spillover is extremely sensitive to market performance.

The conclusion further expands the practical application and theoretical framework of behavioral finance in green finance and provides a new reference for investors and regulators. Besides, this study also lays a theoretical basis for investors to focus on the practical application of volatility prediction and risk management in green securities.

This paper investigates the impact of investor attention on the COVID-19 concept stocks in China's stock market from the perspectives of the macroeconomy, the stock market and the COVID-19 pandemic.

On the basis of controlling the time effects and individual fixed effects, this paper studies the impact of investor attention on the COVID-19 concept stocks in China's stock market through a set of fixed effect panel data models. Among them, investor attention focuses on macroeconomy, stock market and the COVID-19 pandemic, respectively, while stock indicators cover return, volatility and turnover. In addition, this paper also examines the heterogeneity influence of investor attention on the COVID-19 concept stocks from the perspective of time and stock classification.

Findings indicate that the attention to macroeconomy does not have a statistically significant effect on the return, unlike the attention to stock market and COVID-19 incident. Three types of investor attention have significant positive effects on the volatility and turnover rate. During the outbreak of the domestic epidemic, the impact of investor attention was significantly higher than that during the outbreak of the epidemic overseas. A finer-grained analysis shows that the attention to stock market has significantly increased the return of preventive type and treatment type stocks, while diagnostic-related stocks have been most affected by the attention to COVID-19 incident.

The major limitation of this work is the construction of investor attention. Although Baidu index is widely used, investor attention can be assessed more accurately based on more unstructured data. In addition, the effect of the COVID-19 can also be investigated in a longer time domain. Further research can be combined with the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic to more comprehensively evaluate its impact on the stock market.

The research proves that investor attention plays an important role in stock pricing and provides empirical evidence on the behavioral foundations of the conceptual sector of the stock market under uncertainty. It also has practical implications for regulators and investors interested in conducting accurate asset allocation and risk assessment.

Based on the theory of limited attention, the purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the investor behavior is influenced by attention, using the sample from earning announcement in China.

Empirical research using the earning announcement data in China. Specifically, the authors use the sample from 2005 to 2010 in listed A-share firms with earning announcements in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock market. Panel data regressions are used with Newey and West (1987) to correct for the potential heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation. The empirical results strongly support the hypothesis that limited attention impact investor behavior in China.

The authors find that the immediate price and volume reaction to earning surprise is much weaker and post-announcement drift is much stronger when a greater number of firms make earning announcements on the same day. The authors explain these findings mainly from behavioral bias. When investors process multiple information signals immediately or perform multiple objects simultaneously, their attention will be allocated selectively due to cognitive constraints. Such limited attention causes severe underreaction to immediate earnings announcement, therefore leads to mispricing abnormal related to public accounting information. In the long-run, the market adjusted and there is post-announcement drift.

Consistent with Hirshleifer et al. (2009), the findings in this study indicate that individual investors’ behaviors are influenced by their limited attention in China. The results are different from Yu and Wang (2010) conclusions that same-day concentrated announcement help investors and facilitate information dissemination in China. The findings are explained by the investor distraction hypothesis proposed by Hirshleifer et al. (2009) that investor distraction causes market underreaction.

The arrival of simultaneously extraneous earning information cause market prices and trading volume to react slowly to the relevant news about a firm because competing information signals distract investor from a given firm, causing market price to underreact to relevant news. These finding help us understand investor behavior and the impact of limited attention on security market.

Investor limited attention not only affects their stock-buying behavior, but also has an important impact on the efficiency of security market. Specifically, limited attention drive immediate underreaction to earning announcement and the post-earning announcement drift, especially when a greater number of same-day earning announcements are made by other firms.

Limited attention affects security market in China.

The purpose of this paper is to theoretically and empirically explore the effects of attention levels on individual investors' investment return.

By introducing the heterogeneous attention, the authors first expand the theoretical model of Barber and Odean. The authors use graphical analysis, univariate analysis, multiple regression analysis and construct a portfolio to carry out an empirical study.

The authors first find evidence in support of Barber and Odean's price pressure hypothesis. By theoretical and empirical study, the authors conclude that attention negatively affects individual investors' investment return.

By introducing the heterogeneous attention, the paper provides a theoretical basis for empirical study. Baidu abnormal search volume was used as a proxy for individual investors' attention, and analysts' neutral ratings were used to empirically verify the theoretical theorem.

The purpose of this study is to examine the role of retail investors’ green attention in promoting corporate environmental investments (EIs) using a communication sample on “Hudongyi” from 2011 to 2022.

In this paper, Python is used to capture data and text analysis techniques to obtain green attention information. In the word-matching process, words are matched in the target document one by one based on the preset dictionary and vocabulary rules. In addition to employing fixed effects, this study also incorporates instrumental variables using two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimation and applies the Heckman two-step method to verify the regression results.

First, this paper empirically examines the positive influence of retail investors’ green attention on EIs. Second, the findings show that retail investors’ green attention promotes EIs through decreasing principal-agent costs and principal-principal costs. Third, the results show that retail investor’s supervision effect is strengthened under the following three circumstances: executives with stronger green conception, corporations with less information asymmetry and areas with higher level of investor protection.

Our findings broaden the scope of prior research by exploring the impact of retail investor activism on nonfinancial outcomes, contributing to understanding the “black box” of how investor attention fosters EIs. Moreover, by leveraging the power of technology, retail investors have evolved from being the “silent majority” to being actively engaged. The internet has empowered retail investors by providing them with access to information and enabling them to exercise “voice” rights by appealing companies to engage in pro-environmental activities. Our study can provide useful suggestions for the green development of listed companies in China, as well as in other emerging countries.

Unlike other studies that focus on the deterrent effect and corporate financial outcomes of retail investors, we focus on the supervisory effect of retail investors and verify its role in driving EIs. This fills the knowledge gap in prior studies and contributes new insights to explain EIs and extends the understanding of retail investor activism.

This analysis is the first to explore the overall roles of the offsetting attraction and distraction influences of earnings news in shaping the level of attention given to the equity market by market participants.

We use multivariate regression approach and examine how trading activity levels within the set of non-announcing firms varies with respect to collective measures of contemporaneous earnings announcement visibility. We employ attention and information transfer theories in our hypothesis development.

This analysis is the first to explore the overall roles of the offsetting attraction and distraction influences of earnings news in shaping the level of attention given to the equity market by market participants. Specifically, we examine how the number of earnings announcement activity affects investor attention as measured by trading volume given to the set of non-announcing firms. We find that while earnings announcement numbers lower trading volume responses to earnings news among announcing firms (consistent with Hirshleifer et al., 2009), their distractive influence does not carry over into the market as a whole. More importantly, investor attention to both the overall market and the larger subset of non-announcing firms increase in response to earnings news activity levels. However, after decomposing the announcers as same-industry and different-industry announcers, we find that investor attention to the non-announcing segment of the market increases with the number of same-industry announcers, but actually seems to decrease (i.e. they distract attention) with the number of different-industry announcers. We also find that the associated earnings surprise brings attention to non-announcing firms (consistent with earnings news is relevant to overall market price movements). Finally, we find that distraction effects are attenuated in the financial crisis period.

A promising area of future research is to examine the relation between market pricing efficiency and aggregate earnings activity for the set of non-announcing firms. Although it will be a challenging task to measure pricing efficiency for the non-announcers, this will complement the prior literature only focusing on the announcing segment of the market.

First, instead of assessing the impact of number of earnings announcements on the subset of announcing firms, which is a micro-level perspective, we identify the impact of news arrivals on all firms in the market including the vastly larger set of non-announcing firms. Second, by decomposing the number of announcements into industry-related and -unrelated news we show that different types of news arrivals spark investor attention differently, suggesting the importance of categorizing the news into related and unrelated industries.

A potential future area of research identified by our analysis is to investigate what type of investors' attention is distracted or attracted during the earnings announcements. A promising area of future research is to examine the relation between market pricing efficiency and aggregate earnings activity for the set of non-announcing firms.

This paper is the first one exploring the overall roles of the offsetting attraction and distraction influences of earnings announcements in shaping the level of investor attention given to the equity market by market participants. Our findings should be of interest to investors, analysts, security market regulators and researchers.

The paper aims to investigate the relationship between different investor attention proxies for different types of funds (retail vs institutional ones) looking at a sample of real estate funds.

The authors collect data about searching frequency on Google and all the news published in Italian specialized newspapers for a set of real estate funds. Following the approach proposed by Da, Engelberg and Gao, the authors construct a set of attention proxies and they compare the ranking with some summary statistics and evaluate the causality relationship among them using a Granger causality test.

Results demonstrate that online search frequency is relevant for both institutional and retail funds and normally internet data are able to anticipate the news that will be published in the newspapers.

The analysis proposed is focused only on a small real estate market (Italy) where funds are specialized for the type of investor. A wider database can allow excluding that results achieved are biased by the specific features of the market analysed.

The role of internet proxies attention measures also for institutional investors demonstrate that the managing companies offering financial instruments reserved to institutional investors should consider both channels of information – newspapers and the internet – to measure any positive or negative sign of investor attention to their products.

The article represents the first analysis of investor attention proxies on the real estate market and the first comparison of investor attention proxies for retail and institutional investors.