Seminar by Kamila Duraj, Doctoral Student at the Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE

The first seminar of the 2025/2026 summer semester, organized as part of the Warsaw Economic Seminars series, will be delivered by Kamila Duraj, a doctoral student at the Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE and the Goethe University Frankfurt. The speaker will present a lecture titled “Rethinking the Stock Market Participation Puzzle: A Qualitative Approach”. The study is co-authored by Daniela Grunow, Michael Haliassos, Christine Laudenbach and Stephan Siegel.

[The abstract of the presentation is provided below.]

We cordially invite you to attend the seminar, which will take place on 19 February at 17:00 in room A201 at the Faculty of Economic Sciences.

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We revisit the puzzle of limited stock market participation using qualitative methods common in other social sciences but rare in economics. Through in-depth interviews with investors and non-investors in Germany — a high-income country with low market participation—we elicit open-ended reflections on money without mentioning investing upfront. This allows beliefs and barriers to emerge naturally. We analyze these interviews using traditional human-led content analysis, complemented with a large language model (LLM)-based approach. We validate our findings using a representative survey of more than 7,000 individuals. While many known factors appear, we uncover a pervasive misconception: participation is believed to require selecting “safe” stocks, avoiding “bad” ones, and timing the market through monitoring and frequent trading. This inflates perceived costs and deters participation. Some investors overcome these barriers with suport from family, friends, or trusted advisors. Notably, even active investors hold these beliefs, suggesting the misconception influences both entry and behavior in the market.