Hong and Kacperczyk (2010) document that decreases in analyst competition due to broker mergers encourage analysts to please managers, leading to greater consensus optimism bias. We propose three additional effects of analyst competition. The analyst effort hypothesis suggests that weaker...

Hong and Kacperczyk (2010) document that decreases in analyst competition due to broker mergers encourage analysts to please managers, leading to greater consensus optimism bias. We propose two addition effects of analyst competition. The hardworking hypothesis suggests that lower competition...

Building on dynamic collusion theories, we predict that firms with less concentrated upstream or downstream industries have lower systematic risk because their supply chain partners tend to compete more aggressively during recessions, absorbing more of the adverse effect of aggregate shocks....