The Influence of Interest Rates on the Number of Individual Investors in the Brazilian Stock Exchange

This work aims to determine whether a relationship exists between the decline in interest rates and the migration of fixed-income investors to riskier investments, such as variable-income assets. The study seeks to verify whether variables such as the market risk premium, the level of financial education, and the depth of the capital market have explanatory power. This analysis begins in 2002, as complete data are available from this period and extend until the end of 2022. Through the use of the econometric model ARDL (Autoregressive with Distributed Lags), which seeks to test the level of long-term cointegration of stationary variables at different levels of stationarity, it was possible to identify the statistical relevance of the variables market depth and financial education in the increase in the number of investors on the Brazilian stock exchange, denoted by the cointegration of these variables.