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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.

This chapter investigates attention theory by examining retail investors' true intention to purchase. Attention theory indicates that investors, and especially retail investors, typically invest in stocks about which they are aware. Previous studies test attention theory by analyzing stock price behavior or trading volume. However, stock prices and trading volume are primarily driven by institutional investors rather than retail investors. We examine investor attention using initial public offering (IPO) subscriptions in Taiwan because only retail investors are allowed to subscribe to Taiwanese IPOs. We use media coverage as a measure of passive retail investor attention and Google search volume as a measure of active retail investor attention. Our results reveal that active attention has a more profound relationship with retail investor IPO subscriptions than passive attention does. Additionally, information about the value of IPOs taken from trading prices in the pre-IPO market mitigates the effects of attention theory.

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 regulatory design of Indian stock market provides us with the opportunity to disaggregate initial returns into two categories, i.e. voluntary premarket underpricing and post market mispricing. This study explores the impact of investor attention on the disaggregated short-run returns and long-run performance of initial public offerings (IPOs).

The study employs regression techniques on the sample of IPOs listed from 2005 to 2019. It measures investor attention with the help of the Google Search Volume Index (GSVI) extracted from Google Trends. Along with GSVI, the subscription rate is used as a proxy to measure investor attention.

The empirical results suggest a positive and significant relationship between initial returns and investor attention, thus validating the attention theory for Indian IPOs. Furthermore, when the returns are analysed for a more extended period using buy-and-hold abnormal returns (BHARs), it was found that price reversal holds in the long run.

This study highlights the importance of information diffusion in the market. It emphasizes the behavioural tendency of the investors in the pre-market, which reduces the market efficiency. Hence, along with fundamentals, investor attention also plays an essential role in deciding the returns for an IPO.

According to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies that has attempted to explore the influence of investor attention and its interplay with underpricing and long-run performance for IPOs of Indian markets.

This paper aims to examine the direct and indirect effects of advertising on investor behavior.

The authors use a novel and direct measure of investor attention: the number of investors whose watch lists has the stock.

The authors find that beyond its direct effect through information dissemination, advertising has an indirect effect with regard to grabbing investor attention and the trading response. The authors further find that an increase in attention induces a positive influence on the impact of advertising on investor behavior.

First, it complements studies of home bias, in which investors are more likely to buy familiar stocks. Second, it also complements the literature on advertising and investor attention and on attention and capital markets. Third, with a new and unambiguous measure of investor attention. Fourth, combining the direct and indirect aspects, this study presents a detailed description of the financial market effect of advertising.

Considering the role of analysts in disseminating information, the paper explains the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle of China's stock market. As the largest developing country, China's research can provide meaningful reference for the research of financial markets in other new countries.

From the perspective of behavior, establishing a direct link between individual investor attention and stock price overvaluation.

The authors find that there is a significant idiosyncratic volatility puzzle in China's stock market. Due to the role of mispricing, individual investor attention significantly enhances the idiosyncratic volatility effect, that is, as individual investor attention increases, the greater the idiosyncratic volatility, the lower the expected return. Attention can explain the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle in China's stock market. In addition, due to the role of information production and dissemination, securities analysts can reduce the degree of market information asymmetry and enhance the transparency of market information.

China is the second largest economy in the world, and few scholars analyze it from the perspective of investors' attention. The authors believe this paper has the potential in contributing to the academia.

Non-financial information disclosure may reflect the quality of corporate financial reports or disclosure policy choices. The authors examine the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and accounting conservatism and also investigate channels through which such effects are transmitted. The purpose of this paper is to explore how CSR, as non-financial information that has received widespread attention, affects choices regarding corporate financial policy.

Using ordinary least squares regression, the authors analyze China CSR Score data for 2010–2018. They control certain influencing variables related to the nature and characteristics of enterprises and discover that CSR can effectively increase accounting conservatism. Then, they extract the components of market reactions to CSR and study the market reaction path of CSR as it affects financial policy. They also conduct a robustness test to ensure that the results are not accidental in a complex environment.

The results reveal the influence of non-financial information on firms’ financial policy. In addition, the results confirm the attraction of liquidity and investor attention as the major market reaction channels by which CSR significantly promotes accounting conservatism. Additionally, other critical paths of influence deserve further exploration. The results remain robust for alternate measures of accounting conservatism, different components of CSR, other proxies on CSR, endogenous testing and alternate estimation methods.

The study represents the first analysis of the influence of CSR information disclosure on accounting conservatism in emerging markets, and it undertakes a preliminary exploration to clarify the mechanism of CSRs’ role in accounting conservatism. The results also provide a policy reference for external supervision and internal governance of enterprises. Thus, the results can help company managers maintain a favorable corporate image and establish a high-level investor protection mechanism.

Motivated by the lure of cryptocurrencies for retail investors, whose concentrated holdings are particularly exposed to price crash risk, this paper aims to study the relationship between investor attention and crash risk for a range of cryptocurrencies.

This study adopts a quantile regression approach to determine the effect of investor attention on crash risk. Crash risk is measured using the negative coefficient of skewness and down up volatility.

This study finds that the connection is concentrated in the tails of the crash risk distribution. Investor attention has a positive relationship with crash risk when crash risk is low (below-median quantiles) and negative when crash risk is high (above-median). The findings are consistent for different measures of crash risk, for alternate internet searches and for a panel of large cryptocurrencies in addition to Bitcoin. This study also notes seasonality in crash risk, with higher crash risk during the June–August period and lower crash risk in the Halloween period that runs from November to April.

The results provide insights that are not apparent in previous analyses of cryptocurrency price crash risk. The results are particularly important for retail investors, who constitute a large portion of the cryptocurrency market, as they tend to hold concentrated investments and so a price crash of a single asset may have a large bearing on their wealth.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine whether investor attention is a significant risk pricing factor.

Using investor attention data from Eastmoney.com, which provides for each stock the number of investors whose watch list includes that stock on a daily basis, this paper constructs a “heat” factor based on the change in investor attention and a “market exposure” factor based on the proportion of attention on a given stock over the attention to all stocks. Using the Fama−MacBeth two-step regression and a rolling analysis, this study examines the ability of the investor attention factor to explain market returns.

The empirical results show that there exists a risk premium for the “heat” factor and “market exposure” factor that is significantly different from zero. This finding shows that investor attention can systematically influence stock returns, making it a significant risk pricing factor.

This paper’s research on the risk pricing factors of investor attention can help investors to rationally build investment portfolios, avoid risks and form a sound investment concept, which will further reveal the information recognition mechanism of the capital market and standardize the information disclosure behavior of listed companies.

This paper provides evidence that investor attention is a risk pricing factor for the stock market. There are “heat” factors and “market exposure” factors in the Chinese stock market that significantly affect the purchasing behavior of individual investors.

A commitment to social responsibility is indispensable to the sustainable development of a firm, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a key corporate evaluation indicator. CSR's economic consequences have long been a hot topic in academic research. The authors analyze the relationship between CSR and corporate capital structure and also investigate channels through which such links are transmitted.

Using CSR score (CSRS) data published by China's Hexun (hexun.com) from 2010 to 2018, the authors control some influencing variables of the nature and characteristics of enterprises and discover that CSR can effectively improve firm leverage using ordinary least square regression. In addition, the research results remain robust for other CSR proxies, different dimensions of CSR, alternative measures of leverage and endogenous testing.

The authors discover that CSR can significantly reduce firm leverage. In addition, the research results confirm that investor attention and liquidity are the main channels by which CSR effectively reduces leverage, and other influence channels are worthy of further exploration. After examining the substitution variables and endogenous characteristics of CSR, the results remain robust.

Regarding decision-making and governance within companies, the authors conclude that CSR reports not only announce the status of CSR activities to corporate stakeholders but also reveal information on corporate financial decisions. Considering the widespread agency problems in companies, management may take advantage of investor understanding of CSR reports and conceal real information or disclose false information. They distort investors' understanding of the financial policies of financial reports to achieve their self-interests. Hence, companies must reinforce their governance and construct comprehensive monitoring mechanisms for CSR disclosure to protect their investors, establish a strong corporate reputation and facilitate long-term development.