Johns Hopkins University. (The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to Johns Hopkins University.)
We explore how investor memory drives belief formation and trading behavior, fueling financial market volatility. Drawing on surveys of over 17,000 Chinese retail investors linked to trading records, our study finds that recollections of past returns—shaped by both salient market events in the past and current market conditions—strongly influence expectations of future returns and investors’ portfolio choices, often outweighing objective historical data. These findings suggest that memory-driven biases amplify boom-and-bust cycles, with policy implications for improving market stability by counteracting distorted recall.
China's 2021 “Double Reduction'' policy, which banned for-profit K12 academic tutoring, triggered an abrupt contraction in the education-services labor market. Using real-time job-posting and firm-registration data, we estimate over three million job openings lost in four months and at least 11 billion RMB in value-added tax (VAT) revenue losses within 18 months, alongside unintended negative spillovers to untargeted arts and sports training.