Neighbors Matter: Causal Community Effects and Stock Market Participation

Jeffrey R. Brown, Zoran Ivkovich, Paul A. Smith, Scott Weisbenner

NBER Working Paper No. 13168
Issued in June 2007
NBER Program(s):   AG   AP   PE

This paper establishes a causal relation between an individual's decision of whether to own stocks and average stock market participation decision 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 non-native 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-by-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.

(243 K)

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Published: Jeffrey R. Brown & Zoran Ivkovic & Paul A. Smith & Scott Weisbenner, 2008. "Neighbors Matter: Causal Community Effects and Stock Market Participation," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 63(3), pages 1509-1531, 06.

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