Top sportsmen often refer to competition against other top sportsmen as a motivation to exert more effort. We examine whether a similar pattern exists among another group of top professionals – star analysts. Our evidence suggests that star analysts concentrate their efforts and generate...

We examine the performance of acquirers who hire an advisor that employs a “star” analyst covering the target (i.e., “star-crossed” deals) and show that such deals have lower abnormal announcement returns (2.1%), lower total acquisition returns (8.9%), and greater subsequent goodwill...

It is conventionally perceived in the literature that weak analysts are likely to under-weight their private information and strategically bias their announcements in the direction of the public beliefs to avoid scenarios where their private information turns out to be wrong, whereas strong...

It is conventionally perceived in the literature that weak analysts are likely to under weight their private information and strategically bias their announcements in the direction of the public beliefs to avoid scenarios where their private information turns out to be wrong, whereas strong...

One finding of recent empirical studies is that financially distressed stocks have large dispersion in their book to market value of equity (BM) ratios. In this paper we provide an explanation based entirely on rational decision making by investors. Our main argument is that the likelihood of a...