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News or Noise: Mobile Internet Technology and Stock Market Activity

Mobile internet devices reduce trading frictions and information search costs for investors, but also introduce attention-competing activities, such as social networking. We use exogenous nationwide and city-level outages of the Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) to investigate the effect of mobile internet technology on investors’ information-gathering vs. attention-diverting activities. We find that trading volume and trading frequency surge by about 5% on days when mobile internet systems go dark, consistent with a greater role for devices (when not dark) in diverting the limited attention of investors away from information-gathering and trading — even when they are used by presumably more sophisticated investors.