We examine how broker characteristics impact the performance of their recommendations in Europe. In contrast to extant research, we focus on a non-U.S. sample that post-dates the important regulatory changes of 2003-2004. Our research has three intriguing findings. First, we show that more...

Using a sample that post-dates important regulatory changes in Europe, we show that a buy recommendation from an analyst on a “consensus sell” stock is, on average, sufficient to cause the stock to start to rise in value. Similarly, a sell recommendation on a “consensus buy” stock can...

This paper examines whether textual management forecast commonalities that arise in a global crisis setting relate to ex post forecast accuracy, and whether subsequent analyst revisions confirm the credibility relevance of these commonalities. This approach is motivated by two conclusions....

We investigate the effects of mandatory IFRS adoption on the comparability of financial accounting information. Using two comparability proxies based on De Franco et al. [2011] and a comparability proxy based on the degree of information transfer, our results suggest that the overall...

We explore whether transparency in banks' securitization activities enhances loan quality. We take advantage of a novel disclosure initiative introduced by the European Central Bank, which requires, as of January 2013, banks that use their asset-backed securities as collateral for repo financing...

Using a sample of European banks, this paper examines the link between disclosure and its economic consequences. We exploit an exogenous cost of capital shock created by the Greek Sovereign Debt Crisis and analyze banks' disclosure responses to this shock. First, we find that European banks...

We study the effect of growth in firms’ balance sheets on stock returns by decomposing asset growth into two components, one that captures real investment growth and one that captures accounting distortions and/or reduced efficiency. We show that these components play significant and...

This study investigates whether and how the amount of firm-specific information incorporatedinto stock prices changes when there is more quarterly, rather than semi-annual, reporting inthe peer group. Using a sample of 33,338 European firm-year observations from 2004 to 2017,we find a...

We explore whether transparency in banks' securitization activities enhances loan quality. We take advantage of a novel disclosure initiative introduced by the European Central Bank, which requires, as of January 2013, banks that use their asset-backed securities as collateral for repo financing...

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...