Graduation Year

2022

Date of Submission

12-2021

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Science and Management

Reader 1

Murat Binay

Reader 2

Elise Ferree

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2021 Tanya Kapoor

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of retail investor attention on the returns of biotech stocks. More specifically, I examine the effects of attention on both short-run (one year) and long-run (five years) returns. I measure a company’s retail investor attention using the Google Search Volume Index for its ticker. Using an OLS regression, I regress the Fama French and Carhart factors onto monthly holding period returns for a sample of biotech companies from 2016 to 2020. In the regression model, I attribute alpha, which are excess returns not explained by the Fama French and Carhart factors, towards the effect of attention. The results revealed that alpha was not significant, and therefore I find that retail investor attention is not correlated with low or high excess returns for biotech stocks.

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