While Merton (1987) proposes that firm value increases with the number of shareholders, relatively few studies have explicitly sought to identify the factors that affect investor participation per se in equity markets. Using a unique dataset that measures the inflow and outflow of equity...

Yes. By observing return reversals following unexpected responses to noisy public signals about market-wide common factors, we show that investors in the US equity market tend to over-respond to public signals for mature firms that are relatively easy to price—old, large, and dividend-paying...