This paper analyzes the distribution of stock ratings at investment banks and brokerage firms and examines whether these distributions can be used to predict the profitability of analysts' recommendations. Consistent with prior work, we find that the percentage of buy recommendations increased...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a direct test of the small-firm uniqueness hypothesis advanced by Ang (1991). We do this by using the 5B-IPO program of the SEC as our instrument to define a small firm. Having identified small firms, we test the three IPO anomalies to see if small firms...

This study constructs a novel measure that aims to capture face-to-face private communications between firm managers and sell-side analysts by mapping detailed, large-volume taxi trip records from New York City to the GPS coordinates of companies and brokerages. Consistent with earnings releases...

This article is based on a lecture at Nihon College of Law in Tokyo and draws on William K.S. Wang & Marc I. Steinberg, Insider Trading (Oxford University Press 3d ed. 2010); and William K.S. Wang, Stock Market Insider Trading: Victims, Violators, and Remedies–Including an Analogy to Fraud in...

This paper surveys some of the prevalent theories of stock market regulation (market failure and public choice.) The validity of generalizing U.S. regulatory experience to the markets of other nations depends on which, if any, of these popular theories holds. No convincing evidence exists to...

In this paper we reconcile widely diverging recent estimates of broker misconduct. Qureshi and Sokobin report that 1.3% of current and past brokers are associated with awards or settlements in excess of a threshold amount. Egan, Matvos, and Seru find that 7.8% of current and former brokers have...

The JOBS Act allows certain analysts to be more involved in the IPO process, but does not relax restrictions on analyst compensation structure. We find that these analysts initiate coverage that is more optimistically biased, less accurate, and generates smaller stock market reactions. Investors...

We examine the information transmission role of stock recommendation revisions by sell-side security analysts. Revisions are associated with economically insignificant mean price reactions and often piggyback on recent news, events, long-term momentum, and short-run contrarian return predictors,...