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...

Corporate tax avoidance is likely to be associated with a high level of earnings management and with high financial opacity in the time-series. On this basis, we hypothesize that analyst coverage is negatively associated with corporate tax avoidance. Our results confirm this conjecture, and are...

This paper examines the impact of teamwork on sell-side analysts' performance. Using a hand-collected sample of over 50,000 analyst research reports, we find that analyst teams issue more than 70% of annual earnings forecasts. In contrast, most prior research implicitly assumes that forecasts...

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...

This paper focuses on the investment value of information contained in the tails of the analyst forecast distribution. I determine the investment value of the tails by looking at dissident analysts -- who release EPS forecasts far from the prevailing consensus. I then test the hypothesis that...

Regulators are not always able to anticipate how mandates will translate to financial reporting practice, particularly when managers are able to exercise reporting discretion. When XBRL, the eXtensible Business Reporting Language, was mandated by the SEC, financial analysts were among the...

We assess investment value of sell-side analyst recommendations from the standpoint of portfolio risk. We match I/B/E/S consensus recommendations issued for U.S.-listed equities during January 2015 with realized volatility of daily security returns up to one year following recommendation issue....

In this research I empirically study the effects of information acquisition by investors or traders on analysts' forecast bias. Based on the theoretical literature on sell-side analysts, I argue that forecast bias is correlated to investors' information gathering, in two opposite directions. On...