Both bond rating agencies and equity analysts evaluate public companies and report their findings and opinions to market participants. Regulation Fair Disclosure (FD) changed the dynamics of the market and placed restrictions on the information that companies could disclose to analysts. Debt...

In this paper we provide evidence on analyst activity and performance in 47 countries around the world, including several emerging market economies. Our empirical analysis first demonstrates wide variation in the extent and accuracy of analyst activity across our sample countries. A handful of...

This paper investigates how firms react strategically to investor sentiment via their disclosure policies in an attempt to influence the sentiment-induced biases in expectations. Proxying for sentiment using the Michigan Consumer Confidence Index, we show that during low-sentiment periods,...

In this paper we conjecture that the weak association between disclosure and cost of equity capital found in the literature (Botosan, 1997) can be caused by the high level corporate disclosure environment found in the US. We hypothesize that in low level corporate disclosure environments the...

We investigate the accounting quality attributes of nineteen general purpose accounting standards implemented over the past thirty years. Our research is timely given recent criticism of U.S. standard setting, within the context of international convergence. Evidence on how U.S. accounting...

There is compelling empirical evidence to suggest that good news about corporate performance comes out early but bad news comes out late. Regardless of the underlying reason for such differential timing, existence of such systematic behavior leads to three related questions that we seek to...

This study examines the effect of equity ownership by managers on a firm's information environment vis-agrave;-vis its effect on analyst forecast accuracy and analyst following. We collect a sample of over 26,000 observations on managerial ownership during 1988-2002 and find that managerial...

This study investigates the effects of some characteristics of the French corporate governance model - deemed to foster entrenchment and facilitate private benefits extraction - on the extent of analyst following. The results show that analysts are more likely to follow firms both with high...

We examine whether analysts anticipate the public disclosure of accounting frauds by studying a sample of companies that have committed fraud as evidenced by the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) issuance of an Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Release (AAER). We use survival analysis to...

This study examines whether analysts' forecast revisions exhibited increased herding behavior following the adoption of Regulation Fair Disclosure. A recent model by Arya, Mittendorf, and Narayanamoorthy (2005) projects that one potential consequence of Regulation Fair Disclosure might be...