We examine the effect of MiFID II, which mandated the unbundling and separate pricing of analyst research in Europe beginning in 2018. We find that the requirements of MiFID II were associated with a reduction in analyst following for European firms relative to US firms, with decreases in...

Using a sample that post-dates important regulatory changes in Europe, we show that a buy recommendation from an analyst on a “consensus sell” stock is, on average, sufficient to cause the stock to start to rise in value. Similarly, a sell recommendation on a “consensus buy” stock can...

This paper addresses the questions whether European mutual fund managers rely on sell-side analyst information with respect to their investment decisions and whether this behavior impacts fund performance. Based on a sample of over 4,300 European mutual funds and around 1.2 million portfolio...

In multi-country studies, researchers frequently extract data in a single currency rather than in native currencies. This approach can be misleading for financial analysts' forecasts in the euro zone when researchers are using the IBES database. We suspect that forecasts of earnings before the...

This paper examines whether textual management forecast commonalities that arise in a global crisis setting relate to ex post forecast accuracy, and whether subsequent analyst revisions confirm the credibility relevance of these commonalities. This approach is motivated by two conclusions....

This article examines the link between uncertainty and analysts' reaction to earnings announcements for a sample of European firms during the period 1997-2007. In the same way as Daniel et al. (1998), we posit that overconfidence leads to an overreaction to private information followed by an...

Using Institutional Investors (I/I) and Extel rankings and I/B/E/S data for European analysts over 15 years, we show that European analyst rankings are determined more by popularity than by intrinsic skills, the first determinant of recognition being employer size. Becoming an I/I star is like...

This paper examines abnormal stock returns around the publication of 1,167 reports issued by 26 brokerage firms on 37 small caps admitted to listing on the Italian stock market from 2003 to 2011. The focus is on small caps going public because, for such firms, information asymmetries may be...

We assess whether skills allow sell-side analysts to mitigate the opaqueness of a whole industry. We rely on a sample of 5,150 recommendation changes relating to 80 European banks during a period that encompasses the financial and euro-zone crises. In contrast with other industries,...