Lottery jackpot winnings and retail trading in the neighborhood

Journal of Banking & Finance

Abstract

We use lottery jackpot winnings in a neighborhood as an exogenous shock to investing in stocks. We find that retail investors whose brokerages are near the stores that sell winning tickets buy more stocks than their counterparts after the shock. These purchases lead to lower returns. We use a survey to identify the behavioral factors like regretfulness and probability weighting that are the main drivers of our findings. Moreover, these investors tend to buy more lottery-like stocks, but the shock does not affect their selling decisions. Finally, we perform several falsification tests and robustness checks and find consistent results.

Source: Journal of Banking & Finance