We examine whether conflicts of interest with investment banking and brokerage businesses induce sell-side analysts to issue optimistic stock recommendations and, if so, whether investors are misled by such biases. Using quantitative measures of potential conflicts constructed from a novel data...

We study how the composition of the board of directors and incentives from direct shareholdings affect firm performance in a sample of large, publicly traded firms. We use an instrumental variables approach that controls directly for endogeneity of both shareholdings and board composition. We...