Regulators' interest in analyst reports stems from the belief that small investors are unaware of the conflicts sell-side analysts face and may, as a consequence, be misled into making suboptimal investment decisions. We examine who trades on security analyst stock recommendations by extending...

Controlling for other determinants of the cost of capital, we find that firms with repeated large earnings surprises experience a higher cost of equity capital. This finding holds regardless of the sign of the earnings surprises, but firms that consistently report negative surprises have...

We investigate if sell-side security analysts exhibit relative persistence in their stock picking ability. We find that analysts whose recommendation revisions earned the most (least) positive excess returns in the past continue to outperform (underperform) other analysts in the future. Further,...

We examine market participants' reactions to dividend changes conditional on earnings quality. We define earnings quality as the extent to which current earnings are associated with one-year, two-year, or three-year ahead operating cash flows. Controlling for the magnitude of the dividend...

We investigate if earnings forecast accuracy matters to security analysts by examining its association with analyst turnover. Controlling for firm- and time-period effects, forecast horizon, and industry forecasting experience, we find that an analyst is more likely to turn over if his forecast...