The results provide evidence of significant causal community find that a 10-percentage point increase in the average ownership in one’s commu- nity leads to a four-percentage point increase in the likelihood that an indi- vidual will own stocks. To verify that our results are driven by word-of-mouth communication, in our final specification we interact our instrumented commu- nity effects variable with an independent measure of community “sociability” (specifically, whether households are likely to be asked by neighbors for ad- vice) and find that the community ownership effect is stronger in more sociable communities. The paper proceeds as follows. In Section I we introduce the data set, along with our.
