Homophily — individuals' affinity for others like them — is a powerful principle which governs whose opinions they attend to. Using nearly 2,400 advisory meetings, we find that homophily has a significant positive impact on the likelihood of following financial advice. The increased...

We examine whether the informativeness of sell-side analyst reports depends on the strength of the regulatory environment of a country and the regulatory background of the institutional investors of a company. Our analyses are based on more than 600,000 analyst reports from 2005 through 2010...