We study the effects of company diversification and analyst diversification on consensus and individual analysts' earnings forecasts. Company diversification is measured both as the number of segments reported by a company and as an entropy measure which decomposes the total diversification into...

This study shows that financial analysts of brokerage firms that provide investment banking services to a company (investment banker analysts) are optimistic, relative to other (noninvestment banker) analysts, in their earnings forecasts and investment recommendations. Returns earned by...