We examine the decision of firms to list analysts covering their stocks on their corporate websites. We find that an analyst’s experience following the firm increases the likelihood of being listed but other aspects of analyst ability and reputation, such as experience in the profession, All-Star status and forecast accuracy, have no effect on the likelihood. We also find that analysts with mor...

This paper examines various factors affecting Chinese financial analysts’ information comprehension, analyzing ability and job quality. We hypothesized that financial analysts with better educational background, more experience, superior resources provided by large brokerage firms and more information sources have better information comprehension, stronger analyzing ability, and higher job qual...

This paper examines the relationship between the board structure of UK firms and the accuracy of individual analysts’ earnings forecasts with respect to information asymmetry and agency theory. We hypothesize that managers of firms complying with the recommendations of The Code of Best Practice may have “less to hide” and, subsequently, provide more information to outsiders (including analysts)...

It is well known that equity analysts choose to cover firms about which they have favorable views. We exploit this fact and use analysts’ coverage decisions to infer their preferences for corporate policies. Next, we show that firms cater to analysts’ preferences. Firms exogenously losing analyst coverage subsequently change their corporate policies away from the preferences of the analyst that...

This study examines whether institutional investors’ voting for All-Star financial analysts is affected by analyst beauty. Using a sample of 1,135 U.S. analysts and controlling for analyst performance, we document that beauty, on average, does not affect the outcome of All-Star analyst voting. However, a beauty premium emerges in those sectors where there is high information asymmetry on analys...

This study explores whether financial analysts understand two aspects of cost behavior cost variability and cost stickiness. Since analysts’ understanding is not directly observable, we model the process of earnings prediction to generate empirically testable hypotheses regarding analysts’ comprehension of cost variability and cost stickiness. Empirical findings suggest that analysts make syste...

This survey reviews the literature on sell-side analysts’ forecasts and its implications for asset pricing. We review the literature on the supply and demand forces shaping analysts’ forecasting decisions as well as the implications of the information they produce for both the cash flow and the discount rate components of security returns. Analysts’ forecasts bring prices in line with the expec...