The power of attention: examining the roles of institutional investor and macroeconomic news attention in shaping share liquidity

This study examines the joint influence of institutional investor attention and macroeconomic news attention on firm-level share liquidity, revealing distinct effects across heterogeneous market segments. Analyzing 1.23 million firm-day observations from 2468 U.S. firms (2015–2020), I combine Bloomberg terminal readership data—a proxy for institutional investor attention—with a novel macroeconomic attention index derived from a principal-component analysis of coverage in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. The results reveal significant heterogeneity: institutional investor attention reduces liquidity in information-opaque settings, widening spreads for low-institutional ownership and small-cap firms, while modestly improving liquidity for transparent large-cap firms, where attention serves to validate rather than signal private information. Macroeconomic news attention itself widens spreads while simultaneously dampens the effect of institutional investor attention, consistent with a cognitive substitution channel. These effects intensify during market downturns, highlighting the fragility of liquidity when attention is scarce. Propensity score matching, difference-in-differences tests, and alternative liquidity measures confirm the results. The findings provide a unified framework that reconciles previous evidence and offers actionable insights for traders' execution timing, market makers' spread calibration, and regulators' detection of liquidity fragility during periods of macroeconomic stress.