Seminar: Crowding Attention and Herding Behaviour

18 Feb 2025

12:30 -14:45

Times are shown in local time.

Open to: All

Castle Teaching Room (Cambridge Judge Business School)

Trumpington St

Cambridge

CB2 1AG

United Kingdom

See details

If you have any queries, please email Khanti Tsui Add to calendar

Join our Finance seminar

Speaker: Professor Arash Aloosh, DCU Business School

Arash Aloosh is an Assistant Professor of Finance at DCU Business School in Ireland. He earned his PhD in Finance from BI Norwegian Business School in 2016 and spent 2 years as a visiting scholar at Columbia Business School in New York. His research has been published in The Journal of Finance, Management Science, Nature, and The Lancet.

Dr Aloosh teaches courses on Financial Technologies and Sustainability. He was awarded the Dean’s Teaching Excellence Award in 2019 and the Dean’s Best Public Dissemination Award in 2022.

He currently serves as a member of the NCER-FT Steering Committee at the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) and as the Editor of the ‘Social Media and Finance’ area for Elsevier’s Research in International Business and Finance.

About the seminar

This study investigates how social media crowding attention impacts stock market dynamics, with a focus on herd behaviour among meme stocks. We analyse the hourly price quotas spanning from 10 July 2019 to 6 July 2021. The herding behaviour, measured by return dispersion, is particularly prevalent during periods when heightened attention on social media platforms was likely driven by investors having more available free time. Our textual analysis provides compelling evidence that the number of relevant posts on Reddit are strongly associated with the observed herd behaviour. Specifically, an increase in Reddit posts about specific meme stocks is accompanied by a non-linear decrease in their return dispersion, with directional asymmetry observed in both market upswings and downturns. Our results suggest that crowding attention on Reddit contributes to increased interconnectivity and reduced diversification.

Agenda

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No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Khanti Tsui.