Can Online Social Interaction Improve the Stock Market Participation of Chinese Households?

We test whether online social interaction affects household stock market participation. Using the 2017 China Household Finance Survey (CHFS), we show that online social interaction significantly promotes household stock market participation. The power of online social interaction is more prominent than offline social interaction. Furthermore, after dividing online social interaction into user-to-user interaction and user-to-information interaction, results show that user-to-user interaction indirectly affects household stock market participation through user-to-information interaction. Thus, online social interaction affects household stock market participation through user interaction with technology. Our findings remain robust after changing the dependent variable and adding more offline social interaction variables