Does Investor Sentiment Influence Stock Price Crash Risk? Evidence from Saudi Arabia

This paper examines the relationship between investor sentiment and the risk of a stock price crash at the firm level. Our dataset includes 131 firms listed on the Saudi stock exchange (Tadawul) from 2011 to 2019, as well as 953 firm-year observations. To evaluate crash risk, we employ two distinct proxies and propose an index for measuring firm-level sentiment which we use for the first time in our study. The average turnover rate, price-earnings ratio, and overnight return are the three sentiment proxies we utilize in our index. Our findings show that high levels of investor emotion increase managers’ proclivity to withhold unfavorable news from investors, which aggravates the risk of a stock price crash. We undertake cross-sectional regressions by sector to ensure the robustness of our findings, and our findings are confirmed. After accounting for any endogeneity issues with the GMM technique, the results remain the same. Furthermore, we analyze the liquidity effect by dividing our sample into subsamples with better and worse liquidity and find that firms with worse liquidity have a considerably greater positive impact of investor mood. Overall, our findings help investors and regulators recognize the significance of this downside risk and how to manage it in the stock market.