Not all stock recommendation changes are equal. In a sample constructed to minimize the impact of confounding news, relatively few analyst recommendation changes are influential in the sense that they impact investors' beliefs about a firm in a way that could be noticed in that firm's stock...

Typically, the literature evaluates the significance of analyst recommendation changes by their average stock-price impact. With such an approach, recommendation changes can have a significant impact even if no recommendation change has a stock-price impact large enough to be noticed at the...