Sell-Side Financial Analysts and the CFA Designation Program

We examine the effects the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation program has on recommendation performance and career outcomes of the analysts who complete the curriculum and become charterholders. For these analysts, both their recommendation performance and their chances of making the Institutional Investor's All-America Research Team increase during 1993–2015. These effects are attributable to the CFA program curriculum. The results remain largely stable across the pre- and post-2000 subperiods, and they survive an array of robustness checks