Determinants of Relative Investor Demand for Common Stocks

This paper examines the demand for a firm's common stock by wealthy relative to less wealthy individual investors and by individual relative to institutional investors as a function of risk, information environment (proxied by firm size and S&P 500 membership), and form of return payout (i.e., dividends versus capital gains). The findings indicate that among individual investors demand for the stocks of riskier, larger, and low-dividend-yield firms increases with wealth. The findings also suggest that relative to individual investors, institutional investors prefer the stocks of larger firms, S&P 500 firms, and firms paying low dividend yields. Overall, these results suggest that investors find a number of firm-specific factors important in their investment choices and that the importance of such factors varies systematically with investor size.