This article analyzes the manifold situations in which the efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) has influenced — or has failed to influence — federal securities regulation and state corporate law, and the prospective roles for the EMH in these contexts. In federal securities regulation, the EMH...

This paper studies the effect of competition on analysts' forecast informativeness. I show that the impact of competition on forecast informativeness is ambiguous in general, and identify the necessary and sufficient conditions under which more intense competition can make forecasts less...

Sell-side fundamental analyst reports are highly valued in the financial industry and include three main quantitative components: earnings forecasts, target prices, and buy/sell recommendations. An important question for investment managers is then, how accurate are the forecasts of fundamental...

Over the past 12 years, financial analysts across the world have been optimistically wrong with their 12-month earnings forecasts by 25.3%. This study may be the first of its kind to assess analyst earnings forecast accuracy at all listed companies across the globe, covering 70 countries. A...

We investigate regulations intended to stop managers from privately disclosing corporate information to analysts in a setting with enhanced potential to isolate regulatory effects: the European Union (EU) Market Abuse Directive (MAD), a common regulation implemented by member states with varying...

We survey the textual sentiment literature, comparing and contrasting the various information sources, content analysis methods, and empirical models that have been used to date. We summarize the important and influential findings about how textual sentiment impacts on individual, firm-level and...

We document that analysts cater to short-term investors by issuing optimistic target prices. Catering dominates among analysts at brokers without an investment banking arm as they face lower reputational cost. The market does not see through the analyst catering activity and their forecasts lead...

This article shows that aggregate analyst recommendations predict future aggregate excess returns at MSA and state level (i.e. local level). The results hold even after controlling for macroeconomic variables, industry and market returns, as well as investor sentiment. We also show that the...

I study security analysts' early forecasts. Forecasts with over one-year horizons constitute nearly one-half of all analysts' forecasts. I find that the demand for early forecasts is driven by long-term institutional investors and that analyst skills and resources are more important for...

Purpose: This study investigates the behavior of sell-side analysts covering firms that are about to experience breaks in strings of consecutive quarterly earnings increases.Design/methodology/approach: We estimate the likelihood of analysts predicting a break using logit regressions for 1.8M...