Does shareholder protection affect the performance of analysts as a gatekeeper?

This paper investigates the effect of shareholder protection on analysts’ performance. The important corporate governance role analysts can play by monitoring management has largely been ignored in the literature. Using a newly constructed index, we are for the first time able to analyse how changes in shareholder protection over time affect analysts’ performance as a gatekeeper. We find that strengthened shareholder protection improves analysts’ performance as a gatekeeper, i.e. analysts’ ability to reduce information asymmetry improves with strengthened shareholder protection. However, we also find a substitution effect: Strengthened shareholder protection makes analysts’ services less valuable to investors, thereby leading to a reduction in the number of analysts following firms. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. 2014