Sell-side research is a common source of corporate fundamental information, but most of the research is exclusively distributed to paying clients. This paper investigates whether the soft information in analyst reports exacerbates the information asymmetry among investors. I document that the...

In this paper, we examine whether sell-side financial analysts show a bias when translating their soft information into a hard format. Sell-side analysts produce both soft research output, in the form of a textual report, and hard research output, including earnings forecasts, target prices, and...