We examine the influence of institutional factors on herding behavior by exploring changes in security analysts’ institutional environments. Specifically, we identify analysts employed at privately held brokers subsequently acquired by a publicly listed institution (hereafter, “treated...

Individual investors’ overall return in stock markets decreases with the increase in trading frequency due to factors such as commission expenses, insider trading, spreads, and institutional investors’ high-frequency algorithms. In this study, the relationship between believing the technical...

We document that financial analysts exhibit a local-event bias. In particular, we find that analysts located in countries affected by ESG incidents start issuing lower recommendations to firms that committed the incidents compared to analysts from other countries. The effect lasts for more than...

This research aims to look at how firm characteristics and audit quality can affect the earning management practices in the Egyptian context, within the period of 2011–2019. This period was after the Egyptian revolution and has not been well investigated in Egypt, especially after the new...

From European integration to domestic politics to the development of the global economy, technocracy and private ordering have shaped economic behaviour. Such transformative private-driven forces of economic activity flourished through the promulgation of voluntary standards. In view of the...

We identify an important channel through which political information propagates into capital markets—Washington policy analysts (WAs). WAs monitor political developments and produce research to interpret the impact of these events. Institutional clients generate superior returns on their...

In this paper we examine whether sustainability characteristics of stocks and bonds affect asset allocations of wealthy retail investors. Using a large proprietary dataset of a private bank with monthly investment holdings of European private wealth investors, we document significantly larger...

This paper investigates the motive of option trading. We show that option trading is mostly driven by differences of opinion, a finding different from the current literature that attempts to attribute option trading to information asymmetry. Our conclusion is based on three pieces of empirical...

This paper uses the unique setting of the 2007 stock market bubble in China to examine whether information dissemination mitigates bubbles. Using multiple measures of bubble intensity for each stock, we find significantly smaller bubbles in stocks with greater analyst coverage. The abating...

Fu, Kraft and Zhang (2012) use a hand-collected sample of firms with different interim reporting frequencies from 1951 to 1973 to test whether higher reporting frequency is associated with lower information asymmetry and a lower cost of equity capital. Their results suggest that firms with...