The Journal of Finance publishes leading research across all the major fields of finance. It is one of the most widely cited journals in academic finance, and in all of economics. Each of the six issues per year reaches over 8,000 academics, finance professionals, libraries, and government and financial institutions around the world. The journal is the official publication of The American Finance Association, the premier academic organization devoted to the study and promotion of knowledge about financial economics.
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Neighbors Matter: Causal Community Effects and Stock Market Participation
Published: 05/09/2008 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6261.2008.01364.x
JEFFREY R. BROWN, ZORAN IVKOVIĆ, PAUL A. SMITH, SCOTT WEISBENNER
This paper establishes a causal relation between an individual's decision whether to own stocks and average stock market participation of the individual's community. We instrument for the average ownership of an individual's community with lagged average ownership of the states in which one's nonnative neighbors were born. Combining this instrumental variables approach with controls for individual and community fixed effects, a broad set of time‐varying individual and community controls, and state‐year effects rules out alternative explanations. To further establish that word‐of‐mouth communication drives this causal effect, we show that the results are stronger in more sociable communities.