Using a large sample of target price forecasts for 6,415 U.S. firms from 1999 to 2011, we find that target price changes predict institutional trading, even after we control for changes in both stock recommendations and earnings forecasts. The impact of target price changes is economically...

Prior research on equity analysts focuses almost exclusively on those employed by sell-side investment banks and brokerage houses. Yet investment firms undertake their own buy-side research and their analysts face different stock selection and recommendation incentives than their sell-side...

We examine the relationship between analyst research and corporate earnings announcements to explore the relative importance of information discovery versus interpretation of previously released information. Using equity market reaction to capture information content, we find that information...

Whether financial analysts play an effective role as information intermediaries and monitors has triggered a wide spread of debate among academics and practitioners to date. We complement this debate by investigating the association between analyst coverage and firm-specific future stock price...

We separate analyst forecast revisions into components representing industry-wide and firm-specific news. Using the relation between analyst forecast revisions and upcoming news to estimate how completely analysts incorporate their private information in their forecasts, we show that analysts...

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 document that analysts cater to short-term investors by issuing optimistic target prices. Catering dominates among analysts at brokers without an investment banking arm as they face lower reputational cost. The market does not see through the analyst catering activity and their forecasts lead...

We examine the effect of MiFID II, which mandated the unbundling and separate pricing of analyst research in Europe beginning in 2018. We find that the requirements of MiFID II were associated with a reduction in analyst following for European firms relative to US firms, with decreases in...

This paper studies how security analysts use industry-level and firm-specific information in issuing firms' earnings forecasts. Analysts who use more (less) industry-level (firm-specific) information have less available resources and incentives to allocate effort towards costly firm-specific...

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...