We find that analysts who issue more accurate earnings forecasts also issue more profitable stock recommendations. The average factor-adjusted return associated with the recommendations of analysts in the highest accuracy quintile exceeds the return for analysts in the lowest accuracy quintile...

In bad times, uncertainty is high, so that investors find it more difficult to assess the prospects of the firms they invest in. Learning models suggest that in such times investors should, everything else equal, value informative signals such as analyst forecasts and recommendations more than...

Investors' reaction to stock recommendations is often incomplete so that there is a predictable post-recommendation drift. I investigate whether investor inattention contributes to this drift by using turnover as a proxy for investor attention. I find that the recommendation drift of firms with...

We propose a simple methodology to evaluate a large number of potential explanations for the negative relation between idiosyncratic volatility and subsequent stock returns (the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle). We find that surprisingly many existing explanations explain less than 10% of the...

The gambler's fallacy (Rabin, 2002) predicts that trends bias investor expectations. Consistent with this prediction, we find that investors underreact to streaks of consecutive earnings surprises with the same sign. When the most recent earnings surprise extends a streak, post-earnings...

Analyst research is alleged to be biased because of conflicts of interest when analysts' employers underwrite securities for the firms covered. I posit that affiliated analyst optimism should be the strongest for offering firms with a desire to over-inflate stock prices. I hypothesize that a...

Investors' reaction to stock recommendations is often incomplete so that there is a predictable post-recommendation drift. I investigate investor inattention as a plausible explanation for this drift by using prior turnover as a proxy for attention. I find that low attention stocks react less to...

The common belief based on accumulated evidence from the US and Japan is that most price-relevant information originates while financial markets are in operation. In this paper, we present evidence from the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) that contradicts this view. We find that a larger...

The behaviour of volatility for intraday high frequency returns of the ASX equity index is examined. It is found that volatility of the Australian equities follows an L-shaped curve over the trading day that is distinct from the U-shaped pattern commonly documented by previous studies on other...