Investor attention drives analyst coverage. We find that, between 2012-2017, institutional investor attention explains 21.39% of the cross-sectional variation in analyst coverage, second only to market capitalization (22.09%). We build a model where limited investor attention drives information...

This paper shows individuals' product market choices influence their investment decisions. Using microdata from the brokerage and automotive industries, we find a strong positive relation between customer relationship, ownership of a company, and size of the ownership stake. Investors also are...

Individual investment decision-making theory revolves around the logical choices an investor is expected to make to achieve the maximum return on investments. The investor life cycle theory is often used as a guideline to determine how investors will invest based on their predicted life cycle...

This paper analyzes how the existence of sector funds (specialists) within a mutual fund family affects the performance and investment behavior of affiliated diversified equity funds (generalists). First of all, I show that specialists have stock picking skills. Second, information flows from...

We investigate the relation between investor horizon and disclosure policy. We develop and analyze a rational expectations model where the original investors commit to a disclosure policy. Counter to casual intuition, short-horizon investors prefer more disclosure and are willing to bear costs...

We study whether analysts' recommendations and the market's reactions to recommendation changes are influenced by the structure of analysts' research portfolios. We find that analysts maintain more positive recommendations for stocks that belong to the “core industry” in their research...

In the wake of the financial crisis, several countries are to ban commission payments to improve the quality of financial advice. This paper investigates the potential impact of commission bans on the source and quality of financial advice. To this end, we extend Inderst and Ottaviani's (2012)...

The existence of influence among participants on financial markets is affirmed by the theory of behavioural finance through the consideration of sociological aspects. The aim of this paper is to empirically contrast two kinds of social influence, namely herding and individual social interaction....

Using machine learning methods, we develop a new measure of aggregate analyst sentiment. We first train analyst-specific neural network (NN) models that capture each analyst's common biases across firms. Using NN model outputs, we decompose the forecast errors of individual analysts into...

This study examines the impact of shared analyst coverage on the comparability of financial statements. Analysts form information expectations based on the portfolio of firms they follow. I document that managers cater to analyst information expectations by increasing the comparability of their...