Analysts often update their recommendations following corporate news. Questions have been raised regarding analysts' ability to generate new information beyond recent corporate events. Employing a comprehensive database on corporate news we show that only a small minority of 27.9% of all...

We aim to perform a comprehensive analysis of the effects of stock ratings and target prices published in the Japanese markets using a large number of analyst reports. Our study is the first to cover reports published by six domestic brokerage firms and ten foreign brokerage firms. In addition...

Prior research calls into question the general informational role of analysts by documenting inefficiencies, biases, and limitations of sell-side analyst research (e.g., forecasts). Rather than examine the general informational value of analyst research, I examine the value of analyst research...

I study security analysts' early forecasts. Forecasts with over one-year horizons constitute nearly one-half of all analysts' forecasts. I find that the demand for early forecasts is driven by long-term institutional investors and that analyst skills and resources are more important for...

Firms that report consecutive earnings increases, called earnings strings, receive an overvaluation from the stock market. We examine whether the presence of earnings strings affects equity research analysts' opinions beyond company fundamentals. We find that analysts issue more optimistic...

Purpose: This study investigates the behavior of sell-side analysts covering firms that are about to experience breaks in strings of consecutive quarterly earnings increases.Design/methodology/approach: We estimate the likelihood of analysts predicting a break using logit regressions for 1.8M...

We study sell-side analysts' motives to diversify their portfolios across industries. Despite the negative association between diversification and accuracy, over 60% of analysts cover multiple industries. We argue that analysts' choice to diversify is rooted in concerns about future job...

This study investigates the association between analysts' ability to issue influential recommendations and their career outcomes. The fraction of recommendations that are defined as influential are linked to a higher probability of an analyst moving to a higher status brokerage house, and lower...

We investigate whether investor sentiment affects the research quality of sell-side analysts. As institutional investors regard industry knowledge as the most important element of sell-side service, we use it to proxy for sell-side research quality. Using textual analysis to measure the industry...

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...