We examine the effect of media competition on analyst forecast properties in an international setting using 113,436 firm-year observations from 32 countries spanning 2000 through 2012. We find that firms in countries with stronger media competition enjoy more accurate, less optimistically...

We study whether sell-side financial analysts' physical attractiveness is associated with their job performance. We find that attractive analysts make more accurate earnings forecasts than less attractive analysts. Moreover, more attractive analysts make stock recommendations that are more...

We examine whether national culture, in particular, its individualism/collectivism dimension, affects sell-side financial analysts’ forecasting behavior. We find that analysts from individualistic cultures are more likely to issue bold earnings forecasts and stock recommendations than analysts...

Using the industry benchmark CreditGrades model to analyze credit default swap (CDS) spreads across a large number of companies during the 2007-09 credit crisis, the authors demonstrate that the performance of the model can be significantly improved by calibrating it with option-implied...