Purpose

This paper focuses on the influence of social, cultural and religious factors on investors' attention. In particular, the authors examined if the attention-grabbing mechanism works on Sundays, that is, if the Italians' Sunday activities and habits lead to a lower attention to second-hand financial news, compared to Saturdays.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors analyzed the market reaction to equivalent stale events published on the Saturday and Sunday editions of an Italian financial newspaper and conducted a standard event study on abnormal returns and abnormal volumes for Saturday and Sunday columns and a multivariate analysis on abnormal returns for columns reporting positive recommendations. As a robustness check, the authors performed a sentiment analysis of the columns and included this variable in the regression analysis, but sentiment proved to be not significant in the final model.

Findings

The study’s results confirmed that the attention-grabbing mechanism directed buying decisions, while had no influence on selling decisions. Furthermore, event study and multivariate analysis showed a significant lower market reaction to Sunday columns, supporting the study hypothesis of a Sunday investors' inattention which can be traced to cultural and/or religious factors since Sunday in Italy is a day devoted to family, entertainment and religious rituals.

Practical implications

The lower investors' attention on Sundays and the related influence of social, cultural and religious factors have implications for the timing of both corporate communications and financial advertising.

Originality/value

The authors’ paper provides an original contribution, on the empirical ground, to the attention-grabbing theory and to the growing theoretical literature in microeconomics that models attention.

中文翻译：

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吸引注意力的机制在星期天有效吗？社会宗教因素对投资者注意力的影响

目的

本文主要研究社会、文化和宗教因素对投资者注意力的影响。特别是，作者检查了吸引注意力的机制在星期天是否有效，也就是说，与星期六相比，意大利人的星期天活动和习惯是否导致对二手财经新闻的关注度较低。

设计/方法/途径

作者分析了市场对意大利财经报纸周六和周日版发布的等效陈旧事件的反应，并对周六和周日专栏的异常收益和异常交易量进行了标准事件研究，并对报告正面的专栏进行了异常收益的多变量分析建议。作为稳健性检查，作者对列进行了情绪分析，并将该变量包含在回归分析中，但事实证明情绪在最终模型中并不显着。

发现

该研究的结果证实，吸引注意力的机制指导购买决策，而对销售决策没有影响。此外，事件研究和多变量分析显示市场对周日专栏的反应显着降低，支持周日投资者注意力不集中的研究假设，这可以追溯到文化和/或宗教因素，因为意大利的周日是家庭、娱乐的一天和宗教仪式。

实际影响

投资者在星期天的关注度较低以及社会、文化和宗教因素的相关影响对企业传播和金融广告的时机都有影响。

原创性/价值

作者的论文在实证基础上为注意力吸引理论和微观经济学中不断增长的注意力模型理论文献提供了原创性贡献。