Friends do let friends buy stocks actively

This research provides empirical evidence that social interaction is more prevalent among active rather than passive investors. While previous empirical work, spearheaded by Hong et al. (2004), shows that proxies for sociability are related to participation in asset markets, the literature is unable to distinguish between the types of participants because of data limitations. I address this shortcoming by using data from the Consumer Expenditure Quarterly Interview Survey, which contains information on individual holdings and the buying and selling of financial assets, as well as expenditure variables that imply variation in the level of social activity. This finding supports a new explanation for the active-investing puzzle in which informal communication tends to promote active rather than passive strategies (Han and Hirshleifer, 2012).