Date of Award

Summer 8-2023

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Finance

Program/Concentration

Business Administration - Finance

Committee Director

Licheng Sun

Committee Member

Mohammad Najand

Committee Member

David Selover

Abstract

Essay 1: Retail investors from the discount broker Robinhood swarm into stocks with pending earnings announcements and stay away from them immediately after the announcements. We study four competing explanations for this phenomenon: liquidity provision, informed trading, lottery preference, and attention-induced herding by noise traders. We find strong evidence that, immediately around earnings announcements, Robinhood investors’ behavior is primarily driven by attention-induced noise trading. Our results offer new insights into retail traders’ motivation for trading when they face heightened uncertainty from earnings announcements. Our study also goes beyond Barber et al.’s (2022) limited focus on the top 0.5% of the sample by presenting a full picture of Robinhood traders’ trading activity.

Essay 2: We provide the first comprehensive study on the relation between national lotteries and retail trading activities in the United States. Due to data limitations, prior studies are constrained to the evidence from local markets such as California, Taiwan, and Germany. With the help of two unique U.S. datasets on retail trading activities, we provide convincing evidence of a substitution effect between retail trading and large jackpots from U.S. national lotteries. Our findings indicate that this substitution effect becomes more pronounced as the jackpot size increases.

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DOI

10.25777/3thd-r327

ISBN

9798380393447

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