Measuring the effects of investor attention on China's stock returns

<abstract> <p>The increasing abundance of information leads to the scarcity of investor attention, which has become an important factor affecting the financial market. Search engines play the role of information retrieval and record the search behavior of investors, which is a direct and accurate measure of investor attention. This paper investigates the relationship between investor attention and China's stock market. Considering the relationship with stock returns as the mainline, we take the Baidu index as a substitute variable of investor attention to deeply study the correlation and the time-varying nature between investor attention and China's stock returns. To this end, we used quantile regression to examine the relationship over the period 2006–2021 to capture its evolution during calm and turbulent times. We thus investigated the effect of investor attention on the mean and other quantiles. Our findings show that the relationship between investor attention and China's stock returns exhibits time-variation as investor attention significantly impacts the dynamics of China's stock returns, but its sign and effect vary per quantile: investor attention is negatively correlated with stock returns at low quantiles, but it turns positive at high quantiles. In addition, to test the model's robustness, variable replacement method and model replacement method are used to conduct significance tests, respectively. The results are equally significant.</p> </abstract>