We use proprietary data from a major investment bank to investigate factors associated with analysts' annual compensation. We find compensation to be positively related to "All-Star" recognition, investment-banking contributions, the size of analysts' portfolios, and whether an analyst is...

This paper uses a proprietary panel dataset to categorize and quantify the activities that sell-side brokerage analysts use to build and sustain their network of buy-side client relations. We then examine the marginal impact of these activities on key analyst outcome metrics identified by prior...

Prior research on equity analysts focuses almost exclusively on those employed by sell-side investment banks and brokerage houses. Yet investment firms undertake their own buy-side research and their analysts face different stock selection and recommendation incentives than their sell-side...

We examine the performance of buy-side analysts relative to that of the sell-side. Our tests show that buy-side analysts at a large investment firm make less optimistic stock recommendations than sell-side analysts, consistent with their facing fewer conflicts of interest. However, their...

We use a survey of directors to collect data on their ratings of board effectiveness as well as board internal dynamics and key processes. Controlling for many of the governance metrics examined by prior research, we find that directors' ratings of their boards' effectiveness are positively...

Research optimism among securities analysts has been attributed to incentives provided by underwriting activities. We examine how analysts' forecast optimism varies with the business activities used to fund research. We find that analysts at firms with underwriting and trading businesses are...

We study whether outside directors are held accountable for poor monitoring of executive compensation by examining the reputation penalties to directors of firms involved in the option backdating (BD) scandal of 2006-2007. We find that at firms involved in BD, significant penalties accrued to...

We examine the effect of say on pay regulation in the United Kingdom (UK). Consistent with the view that shareholders regard say on pay as a value-creating mechanism, the regulation's announcement triggered a positive stock price reaction at firms with weak penalties for poor performance. UK...