Retail investor attention and stock price crash risk: Evidence from China

Abstract

This paper investigates the effect of retail investor attention on stock price crash risk in China. Retail investor attention is measured by the search frequency from the Baidu Index. Using a large sample of Chinese listed firms from 2007 to 2017, the evidence shows that firms with higher retail investor attention tend to have a lower future stock price crash risk. The results are robust to alternative measures of retail investor attention and crash risk. Moreover, higher quality auditing can mitigate the impact of retail investor attention on firms' future crash risk. We further find that this relationship is less prominent for state-owned enterprises. Those findings not only enrich the extant literature on the determinants of stock price crash risk and the economic consequence of the retail investor attention, but also give some suggestions for investors in the emerging market.