We examine whether conflicts of interest with investment banking and brokerage induce sell-side analysts to issue optimistic stock recommendations and, if so, whether investors are misled by such biases. Using quantitative measures of potential conflicts constructed from revenue breakdowns of...

This paper examines whether the quality of stock analysts' forecasts is related to conflicts of interest from investment banking and brokerage. We consider four aspects of forecast quality: accuracy, bias and revision frequency of quarterly earnings per share (EPS) forecasts, and relative...