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...

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,...

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...

Investors rely on analyst recommendations when making investment decisions. Over the last few years, however, sell-side analysts have caught the attention of the supervisory authorities given their vulnerability to numerous conflicts of interest. In this paper, we empirically examine relevant...

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...

Using recommendations and target prices on initial public offerings (IPOs), we examine the impact of regulations in the US and European Union (EU) markets that were aimed at curbing conflicts of interest in sell-side research. Conflicted analysts, proxied by whether their brokerage houses acted...

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...

Long run returns of IPO firms' recommendations in Europe reveal possible conflicts of interest and pressures faced by financial analysts over the 1991-2005 period. Nevertheless, recent European legislations about investment research have led to better long run performance of IPO firms'...

Die Berücksichtigung der zukünftigen Entwicklung des Wechselkurses ist sowohl für internationale Unternehmen als auch für international tätige Investoren unabdingbar. Allerdings ist die Erstellung von Wechsel- kursprognosen schwierig, da bis zum heutigen Zeitpunkt kein allgemein anerkanntes...