What are the benefits to a firm of having investors with gambling preference as shareholders? Motivated by studies showing that gambling investors prefer lottery-like stocks and require lower expected returns to take risk, we hypothesize that firms with positively-skewed assets can use stock splits to attract investors with gambling preference to share risk and to lower cost of equity. Indeed, analyzing a sample of Chinese firms that split their stocks through stock dividends and using proprietary trading data to measure retail investors’ gambling preference, we find that, on average, shareholders increase by 54% and retail gambling investors increase by 119% following stock dividends. Furthermore, while firms become more risk-taking, their cost of equity declines substantially, largely due to the increased retail gambling investors’ pricing influence. Thus, stock splits are effective for improving risk-sharing efficiency, and gambling investors contribute to lowering the cost of capital.
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