A natural experiment in which customer-owned mutual companies converted to publicly listed firms created a plausibly exogenous shock to the stock market participation status of tens of thousands of people. We find the shock changed the way people vote in the affected areas, with a 10% increase...

Using an experiment to rule out reverse causality, we examine whether a small investment in a company's stock leads investors to purchase more of the company's products and adopt other views and preferences that benefit the company. We pre-register our research methods, hypotheses, and...

We study theoretically and empirically the relationship between investor beliefs, ownership dispersion and stock returns. We find that high dispersion, measured by high breadth or low Herfindahl index, forecasts returns positively for large stocks, as in Chen, Hong and Stein (2002), but...