This paper studies whether dissemination of private, pre-decision signals about productivity is valuable to the principal when agents work sequentially and observe each other’s effort. The benefit of dissemination is that when productivity states are correlated, each agent’s signal is useful...

This article examines the effect of financial analysts’ knowledge structure on their forecast performance based on manually collected data of 1590 sell-side financial analysts’ education background. The longer the period of higher education in one major, the profounder the knowledge in a...

Regulators and the investment community have been concerned that institutional investors pressure financial analysts through trading commission fees to issue optimistic opinions in support of their stock positions. We use a unique dataset that identifies mutual fund companies' allocation of...

This paper examines whether and how U.S. analysts contribute to an improvement in the home market information environment of foreign firms cross-listed in the United States. Comparing return and trading volume reactions to U.S. analyst recommendation revisions to local analysts' for cross-listed...

We examine how analysts' changing incentives driven by changes in market uncertainty affect analyst output, under a simple utility-maximizing framework. Analysts issue more optimistically biased forecasts and buy recommendations under high market uncertainty (VIX). The lower reputational costs...

This study examines the stock-price reactions to analyst forecast revisions around earnings announcements to test whether pre-announcement forecasts reflect analysts' private information or piggybacking on confounding events and news. We find that management earnings forecasts influence the...

In this paper I investigate whether analysts' target price forecasts (TPFs) provide investors with useful direction after material accounting misstatements. I examine the magnitude, informativeness, and accuracy of analysts’ TPF revisions after misstatements. First, analysts revise their TPFs...

We examine the extent to which analysts who participate in earnings conference calls by asking questions possess superior private information relative to analysts who do not ask questions. Using a large sample of earnings conference call transcripts over the period 2002 to 2005, we find that...

This study examines whether analysts' decisions to issue cash flows forecasts depend endogenously on their decision to use these forecasts to set target prices. An endogenous switching regression model, with analyst report regimes of disclosure and non-disclosure of cash flow forecasts, shows...

This paper reports the results of an experiment that examines how analyst forecast accuracy (i.e., how close an analyst's forecast is to realized earnings) and forecast boldness (i.e. how far the analyst's forecast is from the consensus forecast) affect the analyst's perceived credibility and...