Reliably detecting insider trading is a major impediment to both research and regulatory practice. Using account-level transaction data, we propose a novel approach. Specifically, after extracting several key empirical features of typical insider trading cases from existing regulatory actions,...

In this paper, we study whether firm intangible information affects analyst behavior. We find direct evidence that when analysts make more judgment-intensive decisions, such as issuing stock recommendations, they overweight intangible information, leading to overreaction to intangible...

We examine the value and efficiency of analyst recommendations through the lens of capital market anomalies. We find that analysts do not fully use the information in anomaly signals when making recommendations. Specifically, analysts tend to give more favorable consensus recommendations to...

To maximize firm value managers must efficiently invest new capital. This paper examines whether analyst coverage impacts a firm's investment efficiency. Using broker mergers and closures as exogenous shocks to the number of analysts covering a firm we find that firm investment efficiency...

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...

We explore analysts' earnings forecast data to improve upon one popular disagreement measure — the analyst forecast dispersion measure — proposed by Diether, Malloy, and Scherbina (2002). Our analysis suggests that changes in the standard deviations of forecasted earnings can work as a...