The asymmetric effect of retail investor attention: new evidence from post-recommendation revision drift

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the effect of retail investor attention on market reaction following analysts’ recommendation revisions in the Chinese stock market. The results suggest that the impact of retail attention on post-recommendation revision drift is asymmetric. Specifically, retail attention mitigates post-upgrade announcement drift, whereas it aggravates post-downgrade drift. After a series of arrangements to address the potential endogeneity concerns and ensure robustness, the results still hold. Moreover, we reveal retail attention facilitates the absorption of individual firms’ information and increases liquidity to attenuate post-upgrade drift, whereas retail attention induces underreaction due to short-sale restrictions and disposition effects regarding stronger post-downgrade drifts. The results of the additional heterogeneity test provide further evidence of channel tests and reveal that prior positive sentiment can accelerate the integration of good news into stock prices. These findings enrich the existing literature on retail investors’ role in the price discovery process following the release of fundamental information.