Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jfinec/v109y2013i3p813-834.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Company name fluency, investor recognition, and firm value

Author

Listed:
  • Green, T. Clifton
  • Jame, Russell
Abstract
Research from psychology suggests that people evaluate fluent stimuli more favorably than similar information that is harder to process. Consistent with fluency affecting investment decisions, we find that companies with short, easy to pronounce names have higher breadth of ownership, greater share turnover, lower transaction price impacts, and higher valuation ratios. Corporate name changes increase fluency on average, and fluency-improving name changes are associated with increases in breadth of ownership, liquidity, and firm value. Name fluency also affects other investment decisions, with fluently named closed-end funds trading at smaller discounts and fluent mutual funds attracting greater fund flows.

Suggested Citation

  • Green, T. Clifton & Jame, Russell, 2013. "Company name fluency, investor recognition, and firm value," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 109(3), pages 813-834.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jfinec:v:109:y:2013:i:3:p:813-834
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jfineco.2013.04.007
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304405X13001141
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jfineco.2013.04.007?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Zoran Ivković & Scott Weisbenner, 2005. "Local Does as Local Is: Information Content of the Geography of Individual Investors' Common Stock Investments," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 60(1), pages 267-306, February.
    2. Massimo Massa & Andrei Simonov, 2006. "Hedging, Familiarity and Portfolio Choice," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 19(2), pages 633-685.
    3. repec:bla:jfinan:v:59:y:2004:i:4:p:1901-1930 is not listed on IDEAS
    4. Alex Edmans & Diego García & Øyvind Norli, 2007. "Sports Sentiment and Stock Returns," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 62(4), pages 1967-1998, August.
    5. Shlomo Benartzi, 2001. "Excessive Extrapolation and the Allocation of 401(k) Accounts to Company Stock," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(5), pages 1747-1764, October.
    6. Lang, Larry H P & Stulz, Rene M, 1994. "Tobin's q, Corporate Diversification, and Firm Performance," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 102(6), pages 1248-1280, December.
    7. Frieder, Laura & Subrahmanyam, Avanidhar, 2005. "Brand Perceptions and the Market for Common Stock," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 40(1), pages 57-85, March.
    8. Paul A. Gompers & Andrew Metrick, 2001. "Institutional Investors and Equity Prices," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 116(1), pages 229-259.
    9. Amihud, Yakov, 2002. "Illiquidity and stock returns: cross-section and time-series effects," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 5(1), pages 31-56, January.
    10. Joshua D. Coval & Tobias J. Moskowitz, 1999. "Home Bias at Home: Local Equity Preference in Domestic Portfolios," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 54(6), pages 2045-2073, December.
    11. David Hirshleifer & Tyler Shumway, 2003. "Good Day Sunshine: Stock Returns and the Weather," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 58(3), pages 1009-1032, June.
    12. Joshua D. Coval & Tobias J. Moskowitz, 2001. "The Geography of Investment: Informed Trading and Asset Prices," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 109(4), pages 811-841, August.
    13. Aditya Kaul & Vikas Mehrotra & Randall Morck, 2000. "Demand Curves for Stocks Do Slope Down: New Evidence from an Index Weights Adjustment," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 55(2), pages 893-912, April.
    14. Himmelberg, Charles P. & Hubbard, R. Glenn & Palia, Darius, 1999. "Understanding the determinants of managerial ownership and the link between ownership and performance," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(3), pages 353-384, September.
    15. Edwin J. Elton & Martin J. Gruber & Christopher R. Blake, 2001. "A First Look at the Accuracy of the CRSP Mutual Fund Database and a Comparison of the CRSP and Morningstar Mutual Fund Databases," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(6), pages 2415-2430, December.
    16. Jonathan B. Berk & Richard Stanton, 2007. "Managerial Ability, Compensation, and the Closed‐End Fund Discount," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 62(2), pages 529-556, April.
    17. Falkenstein, Eric G, 1996. "Preferences for Stock Characteristics as Revealed by Mutual Fund Portfolio Holdings," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 51(1), pages 111-135, March.
    18. repec:cup:judgdm:v:2:y:2007:i::p:371-379 is not listed on IDEAS
    19. Michael J. Cooper & Huseyin Gulen & P. Raghavendra Rau, 2005. "Changing Names with Style: Mutual Fund Name Changes and Their Effects on Fund Flows," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 60(6), pages 2825-2858, December.
    20. Wu, YiLin, 2010. "What's in a name? What leads a firm to change its name and what the new name foreshadows," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 34(6), pages 1344-1359, June.
    21. Sergei Sarkissian, 2004. "The Overseas Listing Decision: New Evidence of Proximity Preference," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 17(3), pages 769-809.
    22. Mark Grinblatt & Matti Keloharju, 2001. "How Distance, Language, and Culture Influence Stockholdings and Trades," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(3), pages 1053-1073, June.
    23. Jeffrey Pontiff, 1996. "Costly Arbitrage: Evidence from Closed-End Funds," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 111(4), pages 1135-1151.
    24. Gerard Hoberg & Gordon Phillips, 2010. "Product Market Synergies and Competition in Mergers and Acquisitions: A Text-Based Analysis," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 23(10), pages 3773-3811, October.
    25. Eugene F. Fama & Kenneth R. French, 2008. "Dissecting Anomalies," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 63(4), pages 1653-1678, August.
    26. Newey, Whitney & West, Kenneth, 2014. "A simple, positive semi-definite, heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation consistent covariance matrix," Applied Econometrics, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), vol. 33(1), pages 125-132.
    27. Michael J. Cooper & Orlin Dimitrov & P. Raghavendra Rau, 2001. "A Rose.com by Any Other Name," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(6), pages 2371-2388, December.
    28. Lauren Cohen, 2009. "Loyalty-Based Portfolio Choice," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 22(3), pages 1213-1245, March.
    29. Fama, Eugene F. & French, Kenneth R., 1997. "Industry costs of equity," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(2), pages 153-193, February.
    30. Lauren Cohen, 2009. "Loyalty-Based Portfolio Choice," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 22(3), pages 1213-1245.
    31. Merton, Robert C, 1987. "A Simple Model of Capital Market Equilibrium with Incomplete Information," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 42(3), pages 483-510, July.
    32. Bodnaruk, Andriy & Ostberg, Per, 2009. "Does investor recognition predict returns?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 91(2), pages 208-226, February.
    33. Aparna A. Labroo & Ravi Dhar & Norbert Schwarz, 2008. "Of Frog Wines and Frowning Watches: Semantic Priming, Perceptual Fluency, and Brand Evaluation," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 34(6), pages 819-831, October.
    34. Kadlec, Gregory B & McConnell, John J, 1994. "The Effect of Market Segmentation and Illiquidity on Asset Prices: Evidence from Exchange Listings," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 49(2), pages 611-636, June.
    35. Huberman, Gur, 2001. "Familiarity Breeds Investment," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 14(3), pages 659-680.
    36. repec:bla:jfinan:v:53:y:1998:i:5:p:1589-1622 is not listed on IDEAS
    37. Mark S. Seasholes & Ning Zhu, 2010. "Individual Investors and Local Bias," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 65(5), pages 1987-2010, October.
    38. Lee, Charles M C & Shleifer, Andrei & Thaler, Richard H, 1991. "Investor Sentiment and the Closed-End Fund Puzzle," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 46(1), pages 75-109, March.
    39. Brad M. Barber & Terrance Odean, 2000. "Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth: The Common Stock Investment Performance of Individual Investors," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 55(2), pages 773-806, April.
    40. Alok Kumar, 2009. "Who Gambles in the Stock Market?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 64(4), pages 1889-1933, August.
    41. Fama, Eugene F & MacBeth, James D, 1973. "Risk, Return, and Equilibrium: Empirical Tests," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 81(3), pages 607-636, May-June.
    42. French, Kenneth R & Poterba, James M, 1991. "Investor Diversification and International Equity Markets," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 81(2), pages 222-226, May.
    43. Gerard Hoberg & Gordon Phillips, 2016. "Text-Based Network Industries and Endogenous Product Differentiation," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 124(5), pages 1423-1465.
    44. Philip Bond & Alex Edmans & Itay Goldstein, 2012. "The Real Effects of Financial Markets," Annual Review of Financial Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 4(1), pages 339-360, October.
    45. Amihud, Yakov & Mendelson, Haim, 1986. "Asset pricing and the bid-ask spread," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 17(2), pages 223-249, December.
    46. Alex Edmans & Itay Goldstein & Wei Jiang, 2012. "The Real Effects of Financial Markets: The Impact of Prices on Takeovers," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 67(3), pages 933-971, June.
    47. Shleifer, Andrei, 1986. "Do Demand Curves for Stocks Slope Down?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 41(3), pages 579-590, July.
    48. Battalio, Robert H. & Mendenhall, Richard R., 2005. "Earnings expectations, investor trade size, and anomalous returns around earnings announcements," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 77(2), pages 289-319, August.
    49. Hirsch, Barry T & Seaks, Terry G, 1993. "Functional Form in Regression Models of Tobin's q," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 75(2), pages 381-385, May.
    50. Brad M. Barber & Terrance Odean, 2001. "Boys will be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 116(1), pages 261-292.
    51. Gustavo Grullon, 2004. "Advertising, Breadth of Ownership, and Liquidity," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 17(2), pages 439-461.
    52. Lesmond, David A & Ogden, Joseph P & Trzcinka, Charles A, 1999. "A New Estimate of Transaction Costs," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 12(5), pages 1113-1141.
    53. Cooper, Ian & Kaplanis, Evi, 1994. "Home Bias in Equity Portfolios, Inflation Hedging, and International Capital Market Equilibrium," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 7(1), pages 45-60.
    54. Jennifer Huang & Kelsey D. Wei & Hong Yan, 2007. "Participation Costs and the Sensitivity of Fund Flows to Past Performance," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 62(3), pages 1273-1311, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Itzhak Venezia, 2018. "Lecture Notes in Behavioral Finance," World Scientific Books, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., number 10751, August.
    2. Guiso, Luigi & Sodini, Paolo, 2013. "Household Finance: An Emerging Field," Handbook of the Economics of Finance, in: G.M. Constantinides & M. Harris & R. M. Stulz (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Finance, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1397-1532, Elsevier.
    3. Hong, Harrison & Kubik, Jeffrey D. & Stein, Jeremy C., 2008. "The only game in town: Stock-price consequences of local bias," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 90(1), pages 20-37, October.
    4. David Hirshleife, 2015. "Behavioral Finance," Annual Review of Financial Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 7(1), pages 133-159, December.
    5. Phelim Boyle & Lorenzo Garlappi & Raman Uppal & Tan Wang, 2012. "Keynes Meets Markowitz: The Trade-Off Between Familiarity and Diversification," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 58(2), pages 253-272, February.
    6. Xing, Xuejing & Anderson, Randy I. & Hu, Yan, 2016. "What׳s a name worth? The impact of a likeable stock ticker symbol on firm value," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 31(C), pages 63-80.
    7. Hamberg, Mattias & Mavruk, Taylan & Sjögren, Stefan, 2013. "Investment allocation decisions, home bias and the mandatory IFRS adoption," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 36(C), pages 107-130.
    8. García, Diego & Norli, Øyvind, 2012. "Geographic dispersion and stock returns," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 106(3), pages 547-565.
    9. John Y. Campbell, 2006. "Household Finance," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 61(4), pages 1553-1604, August.
    10. Eduard Gaar & David Scherer & Dirk Schiereck, 2022. "The home bias and the local bias: A survey," Management Review Quarterly, Springer, vol. 72(1), pages 21-57, February.
    11. Chenjun Fang & Ning Zhu, 2019. "Name complexity, cognitive fluency, and asset prices," Review of Financial Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 37(1), pages 168-196, January.
    12. John R. Graham & Campbell R. Harvey & Hai Huang, 2009. "Investor Competence, Trading Frequency, and Home Bias," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 55(7), pages 1094-1106, July.
    13. Bradrania, Reza & Gao, Ya, 2024. "Lottery demand, weather and the cross-section of stock returns," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, vol. 42(C).
    14. Dlugosch, Dennis & Horn, Kristian & Wang, Mei, 2023. "New experimental evidence on the relationship between home bias, ambiguity aversion and familiarity heuristics," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 125.
    15. Li, Mingsheng & Zhao, Xin, 2016. "Neighborhood effect on stock price comovement," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 35(C), pages 1-22.
    16. Giofré, Maela, 2013. "International diversification: Households versus institutional investors," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 26(C), pages 145-176.
    17. Barber, Brad M. & Odean, Terrance, 2013. "The Behavior of Individual Investors," Handbook of the Economics of Finance, in: G.M. Constantinides & M. Harris & R. M. Stulz (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Finance, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 1533-1570, Elsevier.
    18. Nicolas Coeurdacier & Hélène Rey, 2013. "Home Bias in Open Economy Financial Macroeconomics," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 51(1), pages 63-115, March.
    19. Daniel, Kent & Hirshleifer, David & Teoh, Siew Hong, 2002. "Investor psychology in capital markets: evidence and policy implications," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(1), pages 139-209, January.
    20. Christina Guenther & Sofia Johan & Denis Schweizer, 2018. "Is the crowd sensitive to distance?—how investment decisions differ by investor type," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 50(2), pages 289-305, February.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Company names; Fluency; Investor recognition;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G02 - Financial Economics - - General - - - Behavioral Finance: Underlying Principles
    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jfinec:v:109:y:2013:i:3:p:813-834. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/505576 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.